The way we make things is about to fundamentally change
“Tooling” – the process of designing and engineering the tools that are necessary to manufacture parts – was the essential technology behind the early industrial revolution. It allowed manufactured goods to go from humans to machines and powered the production of complex mechanical inventions like the steam engine. With new economies of scale driven by machines, raw materials travelled from developing nations to industrial ones, and cost-effective goods flowed back to other nations across the world. Our modern era of global trade and tariffs began. Today, we make raw materials and ship them around the world to factories that make parts. Those parts are shipped to other factories that assemble them into product components, which are then shipped all over the world to more factories that make ever more complex final products. This process is the legacy of the first industrial revolution. Tens of trillions of dollars in capital is travelling at any given time on boats and planes, for weeks on end, across the oceans. Almost every product has a part or component that has sluggishly moved through warehouses and customs facilities where bureaucrats have charged tariffs or VAT. This antiquated process is slowly starting to change. We are at the beginning of a new S-curve, one that will forever advance the way we make and trade goods enabling a new era of productivity. A new class of high-speed industrial 3D printers from companies like Carbon, HP and Desktop Metal, which are closer to a printing press than a printer, are enabling this change and quickly becoming an integral part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These new machines are capable of printing complex parts at a lower cost than traditional techniques like casting and will break even at 100,000 parts or plastic parts. The costs for low to mid-range volumes are almost […]