The Edge

~Plus Ed Kramer on running a CNC farm at home in Texas~ The desktop machine category has expanded to include industrial machinery that’s sometimes hard to imagine actually putting on a desk. One recent addition is Wazer, a desktop waterjet cutter. Bre and Zach headed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to see the machine in action, as well learn how it’s made, and ended up confirming their hunch about who the audience for these machines really is, which is not who you might think. Links and show notes at bantamtools.com/theedge

~Plus James Thompson on working with Fordite, aka Detroit Agate~ It’s not every day that you meet a materials scientist. These people work in a field that’s seemingly so complex as to be inaccessible to most of us, but Liz Corbin is working to challenge this assumption. Liz has a doctorate in design and has spent the last four years inside a university materials science department researching material culture, open design, and redistributed manufacturing. She co-founded the site and organization Materiom, through which she aims to not only demystify materials science, but to make it part of the normal practice of us makers, designers, and fabricators. Links and show notes at bantamtools.com/theedge

~ Plus Stefania Druga on MIT's class "How to Make Almost Anything" ~ You’ve probably found yourself walking along an airport causeway or another public space and have seen a wall that once may have been covered in a billboard now playing host to an interactive array of glowing LEDs that change color as you walk past or wave your hand. Surprisingly, such installations usually aren’t the work of large companies, but rather of small studios made up of designers, hackers, and ersatz engineers. Projects like these require rapid testing and quick turnaround times to stay on budget and are proving grounds for new technologies. In December, we caught up with the founders of one such studio, Breakfast, whose name alone is a hat-tip towards the speed at which they work. Links and show notes at bantamtools.com/theedge

~Plus Jordan Husney on working with GE and running a 3D Hub~ If you owned a 3D printer back in 2013, you probably remember hearing about 3D Hubs for the first time. Desktop 3D printing was still in its early days, and a community of people were coming together on their site to share knowledge and experiences while building out a distributed manufacturing network. And, as we’ll hear in this episode, it worked. Fast forward to today, and 3D Hubs describes themselves as the “world’s largest manufacturing network.” Today they offer not just 3D printing services, but CNC and injection molding as well. We caught up with the Director of Supply Chain at 3D Hubs, Ben Redwood, to learn about some of the recent transitions the company has gone through and what it means to automate human interactions in manufacturing. Links and show notes at bantamtools.com/theedge

~Plus Devin Cooper on making music with stepper motors~ In this episode, we speak with John Saunders about how he initially got into machining and what the current landscape looks like for educating the next generation. He’s the host of the popular CNC YouTube channel NYCCNC and owner and founder of Saunders Machine Works in Zanesville, Ohio, where he spoke with us this past November. Links and show notes at bantamtools.com/theedge

Plus Josh Levine on low-power electronics In this episode, we speak with Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy of CW&T about what it means to keep production close to home. Despite the growing service model offerings like Shapeways, 3D Hubs, or Plethora, Che-Wei and Taylor continue to build out their basement fabrication and prototyping workshop. Links and show notes at bantamtools.com/theedge

Bre and Zach kick off the show and give you a quick overview of what to expect in season one!