Jeff Moe Collaboration
I'd like to see how OSE + Lulzbot can collaborate - I think a great idea would be to help you reach production levels that you need via Flexible Fabrication - ie, that OSE could for example produce parts for you by tooling up with 100% open source tools. I think we should work on this to pitch to Kauffman Foundation, who is itching to fund us. I am looking at your parts - i think we can probably help you quite a bit in streamlining tool chains.
I don't see why we could not scale to 12-24 machines per day within 3 months of recruiting a CTO and tooling up. I think we can apply the Collaborative Production model where the worker's reward is a 3D printer, and our focus is educating people with clear instructionals. I haven't done volumes before, but my experience in the 1-day production runs of our machines tells me that production will be easy with access to CNC machines, so the main block would be developing these machines. This makes a grand case for collaborating with you on open source CNC tool chain development.
- OS 100W laser cutter for thin parts - based on Lasersaur or other
- OS CNC plasma table for metal parts cutting (that's OSE + the Greg Link email)
- OS CNC mill for other precision parts
- Army of 3D printers for scaling complex part printing
- OS pick and place machines for electronics
- Lyman extruders for producing feedstock.
- OS solar concentrator electric by Solarfire.
I would love to do this for OSE in general - in terms of creating a turnkey set of cnc machines that allow us to really kick off the Open Source Industrial Revolution.
If we can assure the correct quality control protocols, that would meet your needs. And it is on-path for us because we want to develop robust flexible fabrication capacity anyway. I could see Loveland becoming a hub for an open source ecology of producers.
In this plan, finding a CTO and concurrent OS CNC machine development success - are two major hurdles.
