Ennex in Digital Fabrication
by Marshall Burns

     In October 1990, when I was nearing completion of my PhD in physics at the University of Texas at Austin, I went to a workshop for entrepreneurs sponsored by the Austin Technology Incubator. The program included video presentations on some of the incubator’s tenant businesses. One of those companies was DTM Corporation, whose video showed a machine that used a laser beam and plastic powder to turn a computer design into a solid object. I was dumbfounded. “Could this be real?” I asked myself. I spent the next three weeks in the library reading everyting I could get my hands on about what I discovered was a whole field of academic and entrepreneurial research and development. I found out that DTM’s technology was only one of more than a dozen processes under development around the world for achieving the same objective, and that a company by the name of 3D Systems had sold over a hundred of a liquid-based machine to the likes of General Motors, Kodak and Apple Computer.

     The technology went by several names — “desktop manufacturing” (the source of the DTM name), “solid freeform fabrication”, and the one that has stuck the best, “rapid prototyping.” I never liked that name because, in my view, this technology would ultimately be about making whatever you want, not just about making prototypes. After being involved in the field for several years, the term “automated fabrication,” and later “digital fabrication,” seemed to better encompass the purpose and potential of the technology.

     After completing my PhD in early 1991, I spent four months driving around the U.S. and Canada meeting as many of the inventors, entrepreneurs, and users of digital fabricators as I could find. Convinced more than ever that what I was seeing was the beginnings of a blockbuster industry, I settled down in Los Angeles and set up Ennex Fabrication Technologies as a sole proprietorship. The company was conceived with two lines of business:

• The Expertise Line offered educational and consulting services related to digital fabrication. The most important product was the book, Automated Fabrication—Improving Productivity in Manufacturing, published by Prentice Hall in 1993. That book led to invitations to speak at conferences in Europe, Japan, and even Africa. I also taught courses on automated fabrication at the University of Southern California (USC) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Major consulting projects were conducted for Dow Chemical, Rockwell International, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hüls AG (Germany), the US Navy, and many other companies and organizations, large and small.
• The Technology Line created new fabrication technologies to be licensed or developed directly for commercial use. The most important project in this line was on Offset^™ Fabbing, a process that forms and laminates successive patterns of an adhesive film material to build up a solid object. Three patents have been issued to date on this technology. A proof-of-concept prototype was built and used to make a number of plastic models, including the Chevy Camaro model shown here. A team of five engineers assembled for the project completed the design of a production fabricator based on this technology and progress was made towards the construction of the production prototype.

     The Expertise Line provided market insight, reputation, and revenues to support the Technology Line. After the patents on Offset Fabbing began issuing in 1996, the focus of the company shifted more and more into the promotion of a business plan to develop a low-cost, user-friendly fabricator, the Genie^® Studio Fabber, based on the technology. In 1998, the company was incorporated in California as Ennex Corporation. In retrospect, this may have been a flawed strategy because the company lost the ability to sustain itself without ongoing consulting revenues from the Expertise Line. In the environment of the bull market for software and Internet ventures of the late 1990s, Ennex Corporation found it difficult to attract attention to a speculative business for a manufactured product. We were not alone in this respect, as the entire industry of fabricator manufacturers and service providers struggled for survival through the Internet boom of the late 90s and the Internet bust of the early 2000s.

     There have been numerous business failures in our little industry, but Ennex Corporation remains in good standing and the Offset Fabbing technology is available for licensing today. The company has diversified into offering consulting services that leverage my experience in technology development and management. The most important asset produced during a decade of operation was a solid understanding of the technologies and markets for digital fabrication, as well a solid network of technical and business contacts in the international community of fabricator manufacturers and users. At the bottom line, we were probably ahead of our time with our plan to populate the world with low-cost, user-friendly fabricators. The time will come, and we will be ready.

     The world of technology is advancing at a tremendous pace. When my book on Automated Fabrication was published in 1993, I mentioned a radical technology concept called nanotechnology and said it would ultimately become important in the definition of what fabricators are and do. Ten years later, nanotechnology is coming into its own, with products on the market and startup companies generating revenues. I’m staying on top of these developments (see, for example, The Nano Coast) and Ennex will be ready to marry nano and fabbing technologies when the time is right.

     Originally, Ennex.com was set up as a Web site for Ennex Corporation’s digital fabrication business and a good deal of industry information was provided as a public service. This content has now been separated into its own site, fabbers.com, which is still hosted on the Ennex server for the time being. At the present time, this is just a depository for the public information on digital fabrication previously assembled by Ennex, much of it written by me. We are talking with others in the industry about the possible use of this content as part of an industry portal.

     Read about other Ennex projects.