Professional Fabbing at Homeby Marshall Burns, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999, Ennex Corporation November 30, 2004 — Bill is a mechanical engineer who operates a small, freelance business out of his spare bedroom. He does about $100,000 a year in the usual feast-or-famine style of ups and downs that are common to such a business. His clients are primarily large companies with overflow work or the need for a fresh perspective on difficult projects. A few small companies and individual inventors also use his services from time to time. Bill has solid-modeling CAD software running on a powerful dual Pentium V workstation that cost him about $6,000. He has a high-speed Internet connection that he uses to download assignments, participate in video conferences, and submit his reports and CAD designs to his clients. He also uses the Internet to send trial designs to a selection of fab shops that he uses to make models for him. FedEx delivers the models to him a few days later, and his productivity and the quality of his work have skyrocketed as a result of his ability to get and review models like this. He spends about $20,000 a year on fab-shop services, the largest expense in his business. When a clean and easy-to-use fabber is launched on the market at a price of $25,000, Bill can’t resist anymore. He leases the machine for about $1,000 a month, and within a few months he’s using about $1,000 a month worth of feed material. The quality of his home-fabbed parts is about the same as what he used to get from the fab shops, although once in a while he still has to send a special project out. The most important advantage he gets from having this machine is his turn-around time. He can now have a model in his hands the same day he finishes a design. Also important: He can have a model before he finishes the design! How so? When he’s working on a particularly complicated aspect of a product, he can do a couple of trial designs of the problematic features, output some samples for examination, and pick the right design direction before continuing the rest of the product development. He is now able to complete projects in half the time it used to take him and the quality of his work has shot up dramatically. His income has risen to $125,000, a three-fold return on his increased cost of operating and feeding the home fabber versus sending all his models out for fabbing.
Household Use One day Bill’s wife comes into the spare bedroom with a handful of small, misshapen shards of something. She accidentally broke the knob on the stove. Has he got some glue to put it back together again or does he think Home Depot would carry this particular style of knob to match the others? Instead, Bill takes one of the other knobs from the stove with him the next time he visits a client who has a three-D scanner. The client scans the knob and sends the data back to Bill by e-mail. Using a color-matching guide that came with his fabber, he fabs a replacement knob identical to the others in shape, color, and texture. It is not quite identical in signs of wear, so he ends up fabbing three more and throwing away the originals.
Children’s Use A few weeks later, little Sally comes running into Bill’s office crying. Johnny has given Barbie’s tea table to Rover and now it’s all mangled with teeth marks. After drying Sally’s tears, Bill designs a new tea table for Sally’s Barbie and fabs it to present to her at dinner that night. She can’t believe how wonderful Daddy is, and she happily gloats at Johnny through the rest of dinner. Before bedtime that night, Johnny asks if he can learn CAD and use the fabber to make models of a new style of race car he’s been dreaming about.
Commercial Use at Home The next evening there is a knock at the door by Eric from down the street. His daughter Samantha came home from school talking about the new tea table that Sally was bragging about at show-and-tell that day. Eric wants to know if Bill knows about the huge market for custom Barbie accessories. To make a long story short, a few months later Bill quits his engineering business because he and Eric are making more money fulfilling orders for Barbie and Hot Wheels accessories over the Internet. Three years later, Mattel buys them out, and Bill buys Sally and Johnny matching Ferraris. |
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