"What would it take to create a factory that could make an arbitrary fastener in 3 hours?"
There are things like having material stock, stamps, etc. But if you look at a screw factory one of the things that jumps out at me is that all the machinery is old old old. Which is to say, the typical fastener factory seems to have machines that were originally tooled up to make war material in the 40's and 50's.
Today, I've sintered carbide cutters, lasers, and machine tools that can repeatedly cut to a tenth. So why can't I build a factory which uses programmable tooling (aka 'soft tooling') that can produce thousands of fasteners per minute? The process can be made parallel in a very straight forward way, more production stations.
Not a YC startup, but how do we get investment in this kind of idea? Can we even? I love reading some of Elon's comments about how ossified the space manufacturing industry is, and how they created things in weeks that the 'experts' were saying would take months or even years to make. We've got Jeff Bezos pulling F-5 engines out of the Atlantic, can we get him to fund the most amazing fastening company ever? Such that any fastener in the catalog can be produced in quantities from 1000 to 1,000,000 with a process where manufacturing costs are fixed across the volume window?
If not, why not?
Before even asking about investment, you should check to see that the math actually makes it profitable to have a soft-configurable factory doing short-production runs. If you do, I think you'll find your answer about why this sort of thing doesn't exist yet (although it does, in China!)
Apple doesn't go to the factory next door and buy screws when it needs them, they need millions of screws to very specific specs and sign deals to have them made by different suppliers for years at a time.
They'll go as far as financing the new factory that is required to fulfill their monster orders. The same rules just simply do not apply.
It takes 6weeks to ship product from Corning's US factory to China.
And they could build a factory anywhere in the world. In the mean time, they can ship as fast as they need. Apple already ships from the factory nearly directly to customers in the US in a couple of days.
‘I Want a Glass Screen’
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.
People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.” †
This is a anecdote that now seems to be repeated as fact, but I have serious doubts about it. For starters there was a six month gap between the first demo and launch, and the iPhone was demoed with the glass screen, as evidenced by this quote from David Pogue from January 9, 2007 Apple went through numerous iterations of the glass surface, trying to find one that’s not too slick or too rough, or that shows grease and fingerprints too much. ††
† http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...
†† http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/some-hands-on-time-...
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-upgrade...
"Apple also announced that the entire top surface of the iPhone, including the 3.5-inch screen, has been upgraded from plastic to optical-quality glass for better scratch resistance and visual clarity."
I work for an APPLE/DELL/otherstuff reseller.
The decision to use sea or air freight is based on a calculation based on the size of the product and its value (and therefore the amount of capital that would float for weeks instead of being here quite fast).
Apple, with its valuable and small product is always Air Freight.
An iMac 27" is twice the value and half the size of an OptiPlex 790. So Air Freight would only make it 10% more expensive.
Apple designs with that in mind.
I love it when people say that. I love it because I work for a company that very much does still make stuff in the US.
We just make more stuff, with fewer people.
We also make stuff in Asia, EU, Mexico. It's hard to stereotype who makes what - but generally sites in NA make the complicated, expensive widgets, Asia make the high volume not-so complicated gear, EU is a mix.
This is a huge gap that filling would reap both financial and political rewards.
On the flip side, let's say you want to manufacture a new custom processor for your ipad competitor, or turbine for your new 787 competitor. You won't get those things in China, at least not without significant involvement from US companies.
Fundamentally I don't believe that. I could just be stupid.
I see the automation that is possible in the US, the infrastructure, and you tell me that its not possible for someone to make a business out of assembling things? Sure its cheap to pull 10 dextrous laborers out of the Chinese working class and make an assembly work cell out of them, what prevents a technologically sophisticated engineer from doing the same with one robot workstation and some programming? I've had boards made and assembled in the US, that is pretty straight forward, getting a tool and die shop to make cases isn't that hard either. What I haven't seen is an infrastructure that ties together all of these small shops like the ones in China, Korea, and Malaysia do.
Disruption is our middle name, why not disrupt the world of real goods?
Here is my thesis, creating a 'small' factory in the US is hindered by the inability of that factory to find work to fill its capacity. That limits its ability to make a profit, so the bids are priced to make sense when the factory is running far below its ability to produce. That makes the costs of goods it produces 'expensive' relative to a factory which is running at or near its theoretical capacity. If we had a way of keeping those small factories pipelines of work 'full', they could charge less because they would be getting more work out of their sunk costs (equipment, facilities, power, etc). In terms of comparative advantage we gain, transportation and communication benefits to the local markets.
So tell me why that isn't possible?
Your thesis is wrong not because it can't be done, but because the competitive gains (transportation, communication) don't outweigh the gains to doing much higher value-added tasks. (Not to speak of the potential costs in having to pay higher wages, deal with environmental concerns, etc, but i'll leave those out because they're political, not fundamental.)
Let's say the US only has 10 engineers, but they're really really good. China has 50 engineers, but they're less good. (Good being a stupid shortcut to saying they have more domain expertise/resources, not Jingoism about the quality of Chinese engineers).
Now the US engineers _could_ start a factory making iPods, and they'd be just as good as the Chinese, or just a little better and sell for around the same price, with a profit $X. It's relatively low startup cost, and has relatively low barriers to entry.
Or, the US engineers could start a factory making specialized composite-material airframes for space ships, which the Chinese lack the ability to build at all (so far), with a profit of $50 * X. It's much higher startup cost, and has huge barriers to entry, so there won't be competition for years.
The US engineers can build the wings, buy iPods from the Chinese engineers, and still pocket a huge difference! Meanwhile the Chinese engineers are thrilled to build ipods, because it's the first step in learning the skills to build Rockets. (Nonsense example, but you get the idea) This is basic comparative advantage with respect to a value-added chain.
Your theory would override this IF we had unlimited engineers and a basically level playing field for production costs at the low end, but we don't for tons of reasons, mostly around regulation (which I'm not saying is a blanket bad thing).
With only so much capital, why make iPods when you could be making satellites?
Now of course this example is trivial for lots of reasons, but the general pattern has been playing out for 100 years.
As nations gain expertise and working capital, they move up the value chain and outsource what they lack the resources or environment to build cheaply. Historically this gain in ability has been accompanied by an associated gain in wages/worker protections (for lots of complex reasons), which even further propels you a nation to move up the value chain, since you only want to build the most profitable possible things that you can.
I am not an economist or a business guy - I move bits for a living. But I'll take a stab at it.
what prevents a technologically sophisticated engineer from doing the same with one robot workstation and some programming?
I think that, right now, there ain't no such automation that can deliver what you want at a price/time you'll be willing to live with.
I've seen demos of such. Give it 10 years and you'll be able to custom order anything you can design, and that is legal.
Quasi-legal items ... well that's what your basement is for.
It's that we are ever making less in the US and ever buying more made elsewhere.
iPods, sure.
But if you're talking really expensive, high-quality, hard to make stuff ... it's likely made in the US.
One just doesn't see it because the average guy sees a lot of cell phones, and iPods, but doesn't really notice manhole covers or iron-castings with millionth-of-an-inch tolerances.
Would it surprise you to learn that US manufacturing output looks like this?
If we can't agree that manufacturing started to move out of the US decades ago, was accelerated by NAFTA, and that we are a consumer of goods made elsewhere (more than others are a consumer of goods made here), then this conversation isn't going to go well.
Not only do we manufacture things, we manufacture much, much more than we used to.
See http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp for data.
There's nuances here to be explored in what exactly is being manufactured, and there's some other interesting ways to extract bad tidbits of news out of that data, but it is certainly the case that the data does not justify running around shouting "DOOM! DOOM!" about manufacturing qua manufacturing in the US.
Personally I'm upbeat about the future. As robots and automation continue marching forward, the US goes from having a major labor cost disadvantage relative to poor countries to having a significant educational advantage. (Not a unique advantage, Europe and Japan also have good stories here, but China is not as well off on this time frame per capita.) I don't expect the broad direction of that curve to change anytime soon.
In summary US manufacturing output is increasing and US manufacturing output exceeds that of China by about $100B, but only employs about a tenth as many workers as China.