Distributed Manufacturing

So many things that we use these days are manufactured in large centralised factories, often thousands of miles away. I was impressed to read about the Tesla Gigafactory, being constructed to manufacture batteries at a cost of $5billion and covering 126 acres – pretty big…
What if we were to look at things slightly differently so that, when appropriate, we designed and made what we need locally, with local staff, skills and resources in human scale workshops? That might force us to question not only our need for certain products but also the materials that we use and the functionality of the products themselves.
Maybe if we took this route we might think of making more use of locally available materials such as timber and also re-using perfectly viable components from products that would otherwise be scrapped.
Think of a washing machine – there’s a lot of hardware going to the dump – the casing, the damping weight, the drum – why not rebuild with the old parts?
Making and re-making locally – something to think about…

Little….and large

We really enjoy the variety of work that we do, not just in the challenge of solving new design and manufacturing problems each day but also in the scale and range of the applications we have to deal with.

Yesterday was a good example, our workload included the design and manufacture setup for a bariatric toilet seat, a set of parts for a model paddle steamer as well as the creation of a formal Technical Document demonstrating product compliance with a European Standard. (Thankfully we are members of BSI, so that helps…)

CAD Model
The SolidWorks CAD model of the bearing housing

So our work ranges in scale from full size house design to this – the smallest part yet, a bearing housing laser cut and engraved from Perspex:

Perpsex Bearing Housing
The actual bearing housing – sorry about the poor focus…

 

So whatever the project – how big – or small (or unusual) we can help: http://www.makersmith.works/working-for-you.html

At Last! – welcome to the Makersmith Blog!

We’re really pleased to launch the Makersmith blog and to to have a great place to tell you more about what we are doing and thinking – and to give you lots of help too!

Things are pretty busy at the moment as we are gearing up to make a large batch of ornate cabinets that our client is going to use to house some interactive animatronics.  There’s going to be a lot of CNC machining, laser cutting and assembly going on as the design includes a range of hardware, timber mouldings, acrylics and glass.

To make sure the design is right we built it all first as a 3D computer model in SolidWorks then made a physical prototype and now head into production.  To find out more about what we can do, have a look at our website here

Detail of the edge of a cabinet
Some of the great mouldings we are using on part of our current batch of cabinets