For world's makers, production tools at fingertips

In the popular press and the populace's collective imagination, entrepreneurship these days is all about social media, mobile apps, online games and the like. Anyone with a good idea, a credit card and a high-speed Internet connection can become the next Mark Zuckerberg, or so it seems.

What's exciting about the current world of "stuff," though, is how it's coming to be made and sold. Today, creative people are taking the tools and lessons of the Information Age and applying them to the realm of product development and manufacturing of real goods. Chris Anderson, the longtime editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, details this fundamental shift in his recent book, "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution."

America has always been a nation of tinkerers. Just think of Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and the phrase "Yankee ingenuity." In fact, our heritage of continuous mechanical improvement is discussed in another recent work, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers and Inventors Who Make America Great," by Alec Foege.

In "Makers," though, Anderson describes how newly available technologies and new ways of working collaboratively combine to drastically decrease the barriers to entry so as to allow nearly anyone to make the move from inventor to entrepreneur in a short period of time and at low cost. Tools such as 3-D printers, laser cutters and CNC (computer numerical control) machines, which have been used in large-scale industries for decades, are now accessible from the consumer's desktop.

All around the country, too, communal workspaces, known as "hackerspaces" or "makerspaces," are being organized, allowing members to share in the costs of tools and materials, and, most importantly, the necessary physical space for building individual or collaborative items. Examples in Indiana include Bloomington's BloomingLabs and Club Cyberia in Indianapolis.

Granted, digitally fabricating a prototype on a 3-D printer is not exactly mass production. But desktop production is only now where desktop publishing was in the late 1980s. The tools will only get better, and the Web, as it has everything else, will only speed up the process of product development and creation. Time to market will be measured in weeks, days or even hours, rather than years or months.

When Karl Marx wrote about power inherent in those who control the means of production, he had no way of knowing that would eventually mean and include most of us. "Makers of the world, Unite!" might be Marx's rallying cry if he were around today.

The machine also has the option of either a 12 or 16 position tool carousel. One particular feature that has surpassed expectation is the performance of the live tooling facility, which has proved highly beneficial in improving productivity as milling operations that would have required transferring of parts to other machines has been completed in a single set-up on the Tongtai.

"The milling capability is much better than we anticipated," says Gordon Burnett. "Our initial intention was just to use the live tooling to perform drilling operations on PCs and to produce lifting holes for the heavier components. However, we have been using it for much more than this and have been pleasantly surprised by the machines performance in this area. The overall performance of the machine has been outstanding and our initial concerns about stepping up to this type and size of machine were quickly put to one side as the machine is achieving all of the tolerances and repeatability targets that we had set for it and it has not let us down once. Our productivity and throughput is improving thanks to the capabilities of the Tongtai machine and we are eliminating many additional operations."