Superb article. Yes, that's the deal. There's no way of evading it
unless we have an all-destructive war in the meantime. Manufacturing
will be returning to the advanced countries. The 20-class will become
much more specialized than now (and will become better power
constraints against bankers than the present politicians) while the
population of the relatively uneducated 80-class continues to decline
due to non-replacement sized families.
Keith
At 11:54 21/04/2012, you wrote:
From: Randall Webmail <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
Subject: So manufacturing comes back. But the jobs do not. Is that the deal?
Date: April 20, 2012 6:38:51 AM PDT
To:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected],
Dewayne Hendricks <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
A third industrial revolution
As manufacturing goes digital, it will change
out of all recognition, says Paul Markillie. And some of the business of
making things will return to rich countries
Apr 21st 2012
<<http://www.economist.com/node/21552901>http://www.economist.com/node/21552901>
OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade
fairs, stands the "Hammering Man", a 21-metre kinetic statue that steadily
raises and lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a hammer. Jonathan
Borofsky, the artist who built it, says it is a celebration of the worker
using his mind and hands to create the world we live in. That is a familiar
story. But now the tools are changing in a number of remarkable ways that
will transform the future of manufacturing.
One of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which shows
machines for making prototypes of products, the tools needed to put those
things into production and all manner of other manufacturing kit. Old-school
engineers worked with lathes, drills, stamping presses and moulding machines.
These still exist, but EuroMold exhibits no oily machinery tended by men in
overalls. Hall after hall is full of squeaky-clean American, Asian and
European machine tools, all highly automated. Most of their operators, men
and women, sit in front of computer screens. Nowhere will you find a hammer.
And at the most recent EuroMold fair, last November, another group of
machines was on display: three-dimensional (3D) printers. Instead of bashing,
bending and cutting material the way it always has been, 3D printers build
things by depositing material, layer by layer. That is why the process is
more properly described as additive manufacturing. An American firm, 3D
Systems, used one of its 3D printers to print a hammer for your
correspondent, complete with a natty wood-effect handle and a metallised
head.
This is what manufacturing will be like in the future. Ask a factory today to
make you a single hammer to your own design and you will be presented with a
bill for thousands of dollars. The makers would have to produce a mould, cast
the head, machine it to a suitable finish, turn a wooden handle and then
assemble the parts. To do that for one hammer would be prohibitively
expensive. If you are producing thousands of hammers, each one of them will
be much cheaper, thanks to economies of scale. For a 3D printer, though,
economies of scale matter much less. Its software can be endlessly tweaked
and it can make just about anything. The cost of setting up the machine is
the same whether it makes one thing or as many things as can fit inside the
machine; like a two-dimensional office printer that pushes out one letter or
many different ones until the ink cartridge and paper need replacing, it will
keep going, at about the same cost for each item.
Additive manufacturing is not yet good enough to make a car or an iPhone, but
it is already being used to make specialist parts for cars and customised
covers for iPhones. Although it is still a relatively young technology, most
people probably already own something that was made with the help of a 3D
printer. It might be a pair of shoes, printed in solid form as a design
prototype before being produced in bulk. It could be a hearing aid,
individually tailored to the shape of the user's ear. Or it could be a piece
of jewellery, cast from a mould made by a 3D printer or produced directly
using a growing number of printable materials.
But additive manufacturing is only one of a number of breakthroughs leading
to the factory of the future, and conventional production equipment is
becoming smarter and more flexible, too. Volkswagen has a new production
strategy called Modularer Querbaukasten, or MQB. By standardising the
parameters of certain components, such as the mounting points of engines, the
German carmaker hopes to be able to produce all its models on the same
production line. The process is being introduced this year, but will gather
pace as new models are launched over the next decade. Eventually it should
allow its factories in America, Europe and China to produce locally whatever
vehicle each market requires.
They don't make them like that any more
[snip]
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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