Pushing the Frontiers of Personal Manufacturing with Open Source Machine Tools

The democratization of desktop 3D printing has opened the domain of manufacturing to the masses. Today individuals can design and manufacture a variety of products in their living rooms. However, scaling a product from prototype to production and setting up a small-scale manufacturing business is often hindered by the expensive machinery and high upfront capital investment required. This paper presents the findings of a unique experiment that was carried out to understand the process of prototyping a relatively complex product (in this case, a 3D printer) in a home setting and then scaling it up to a small-scale production (10 units). In order to partially automate the manufacturing processes, two open source machine tools (OSMT), whose blueprints are freely available in the internet, were built, namely a CNC laser cutter and a CNC milling machine. The experiment reveals the particularities of starting a small-scale production in a home setting and the potential of OSMT to affordably scale up production, while also highlighting the challenges of OSMT adoption.