[rp-ml] Huntsville Open Manufacturing meetup recap

About seven people showed up for the meetup, which is not bad for
something planned in a little over a week. One person brought their
mostly functional Reprap Mendel made from a laser cut kit. He
received some help with a heating problem he was having with his
extruder head. Sadly I neglected to take pictures of the event. I
was much do distracted by the excellent conversations happening all
around me. Makers Local 256 already had a Mantis9 cnc, a large
homebrew cnc, a Makerbot, the beginnings of a stock Reprap Mendel, an
aluminum foundry/forge, and a vacuum forming table. There was much
discussion about bringing the cost down on producing future RepRap
Mendels by going with the Prusa design, switching to SAE measurements,
and buying local. I asked everyone what they would like to see at
future meetings,and a lot of people were interested in receiving some
kind of instruction for getting into some 3D modeling so I'm going to
work on that for next months meeting. I'm also planning on putting
together a kind of open manufacturing cheat sheet designed to provide
information at a glance along with resources for where to find out
more. Both of these mailing lists will be included as they've been a
huge asset to me. There was much discussion of distributed factories,
sending people objects via e-mail or IM, working with different
materials and how they behave under different conditions, and even
some design improvement ideas for the machines represented at the
meeting. Future projects include, powder based 3D printing, UV resin
based 3D printing, even larger cnc machines, and even some food based
3d printing. Everyone had a blast and everyone left looking forward
to the next meeting. We'll be holding ours on the fourth Thursday of
every month. At least one person left the meeting with the firm goal
of making a large 3 axis setup in the near future. It was unclear
whether he was going 3D printer or not.

Given the turn out of the enthusiasm I think running on of these type
of meetings in other areas of the country/world would go over pretty
well. I believe it will help the move the community forward in big
ways and would love to hear about people attempting this in other
places of the world. Feel free to drop me a line, whether it be words
of encouragement, questions, or constructive criticism. Oh and be
sure to work with your local hackerspace(s), they're a great hot bed
for this kind of stuff.

Raymond
Received on Sat Jan 29 01:05:30 2011