Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Reshaping Indie Manufacturing”.
Anyway, so yeah, so my name is zach kaplan, i’m the founder of inventables, and we make a couple machines, but really what we believe is where all this stuff is coming from. We believe that 3d carving is, is changing, not just what you can make, but who who can make it, but we also believe that it’s reshaping indie, manufacturing and homemade and handmade, and all of these things that are going on in the world. So to understand why the hell we believe this stuff, you got to think about what the heck is 3d carving, and so i started researching this earlier this year and i found out that you might be familiar with cnc milling. It turns out before there was cnc milling. There was this thing: 1947, a guy named john parsons. He called it cardamatic milling and the reason he called it cartomatic was because there were no computers, it was punch cards.
He was using an ibm 24 where they would design the whole thing, and then they had to change the cards, and then you can see on the the screen there he’s making a propeller, because his client was the united states military. At the time. These machines were about a million dollars each and the only place they could afford them was the military. So his contract ran out of money like most military contracts and he went over to mit because they had the next contract and one of the professors didn’t like. The name cartimatic, he thought it was like a toy for a kid, so they ran a contest and one student won fifty dollars to rename kartomatic as nc and it stood for numerical control because they were really controlling by the numbers. So if you look at the the points on the the propeller, they had decided where all those points were numerically and that stuck until a few years later, when computers came out, so computers replaced the card punching and this everything to the right is the computer. So it’s actually literally bigger than the man, but some of the industry players. So this is the milwaukee amatic, even though it was a computer. Most people didn’t know what computers were yet they liked the the ring to milwaukee and matic fast forward until today, and so that computer, that was the size of the actually bigger than the the machine, became this little thing. That was on the right side and we started calling them c and c so. Computer numerical control, but today that that doesn’t make as much sense, because a 3d printer is a cnc. A laser cutter is a cnc and a milling machine’s a cnc, and then this happened so 2009. The first thousand dollar 3d printer came out and the number one thing that people started making was yoda’s head and you laugh, but it’s true, and so we started going out and we’re trying to sell our cnc machine and everybody’s running up to us.
Saying oh tell me about your new 3d printer, so it’d be like oh, it’s not a 3d printer and then we’d show the next one they’re like that is the biggest 3d printer i’ve ever seen like it’s, not a 3d printer. We start getting into this intellectual discussion of additive versus subtractive 3d printers they’re, building it up layer by layer, cnc, it’s and people just glaze over and they’re like yeah yeah, you don’t know what you’re talking about that’s a 3d printer, so last fall we launched carvey And in a classic case, if you can’t beat them join them, we started calling it a 3d carver and everybody ran up to us at the events and they’re like oh, that’s like a 3d printer, but it carves it and we’re like yes and so all of A sudden, it started changing the conversation and we’re from chicago, so it’s the homeless second city and i went to one of the second city workshops and they have this principle called yes, and so, as opposed to saying no and shutting down the person’s idea. You’Re saying yes and it’s different like this, and it really changed the the conversation and opened up people’s minds to a new way of doing it.
The other thing it did is we started moving from people that look like this, using the machines to people that look like this, and that’s a big change from this to this, because it means that there’s lots of new people that are starting to participate in the Process and in eventables we now have over 40 000 customers that are using these tools and it’s growing really fast and it’s guys and it’s girls and it’s people of all different shapes and sizes and they’re making really interesting things. So these two guys their name is zach and alex and they have a company called such and such and they make these little block, clocks and they’re all tessellating. And this is the husband and wife team bill and amy, and they make cutting boards in the shapes of states, and this is alex berger she’s got a jewelry company called rock and beam, and she carves out aluminum inserts that are sparkly gold into bangles and bracelets, And then this guy, his name is matthew, white and he’s in indiana and he’s he’s doing three uh complex 3d models for his rostock machine and he’s actually manufacturing and anodizing on his own at his maker space and selling the parts in little kits to other people.
In the community, so we saw this like this – is blowing us away, because this isn’t just a little bit of craft like this – is some serious, serious manufacturing and he’s doing it on a little six hundred dollar machine. And so we started realizing that that to get more people involved, the biggest thing that we had to focus on was the software. And ah i can’t can you guys play the video nope. I wanted to play the video but yeah we tested it but yeah.
Okay, so we built this software called easel and yeah video go to the video before that. One, the one before that one get things absolutely right before they launch um, yeah, okay. So so now there’s there’s a library of thousands of different projects, so this guy’s actually from australia and he’s made a bunny um chocolate holder, and so you can click the button and it’ll open it in easel. This is all free, just go to easel.com and so we’ve made in the last month or so some significant advancements. You can copy the project into your own sort of sandbox and it saves it online and we’ve added this little dotted line above the bunny, which shows you the where the material is and on the right side as you’re, manipulating it it’s in real time showing you What it looks like and you can change the depth like i’ve done here and, as you click uh, the little thing it shows you all. These are all the other files that you have and so people keep asking like. Okay, that’s very 2d. Two and a half d show me this 3d carving, and so one of our engineers did this.
So one of the ways we have is you: have you can import an svg file and we’ve made it so you can specify in x, y and also in z, and so what i’m doing here is now changing the bed of the machine, and so now i’m Going to go in and change the size of the material, so the newest machine that we launched last week. It has a meter by a meter bed, and so now you can go from making little things to making big things like furniture and signs, and then i’m gon na do is i’m gon na. So he made this little trivet for holding like a coffee cup but say i wanted to do it for a big pot. Just drag the trivet up, and so what what he’s done on the svg file is in addition to giving the x and the y he’s changed.
The color of the line from black to white, where black is all the way through and white, is zero or not. Cutting it at all, and you can see it’s giving a three dimensional curve to the trivet as it’s going through the lattice structure, and so now with a ball end mill. It can kind of go in in and carve it smoothly, and you can lay your pot down, and so it’s just an example of one of the things you can do, but this is all free, it’s in the browser and you don’t even have to have the Machine anymore, to start participating, if you can use a tool like microsoft, powerpoint, you can use this and if you go to the next article, so basically you click the carve button in the upper right hand, corner and then the machine will start and it’ll make your Thing and so at inventables. We hope that by giving all the stuff away for free that by the end of the decade, so within five years, we’ll have a million people, a million new people participating and doing 3d carving and making products that they’re very passionate about to really change. Who can do manufacturing around the world join us? Thank you. Thank you. .