Additive Manufacturing

It’s been a pleasure meeting with local machine builders today, it was in fact like stepping onto a vintage film set.

The stark reality is that the hands-on skills of machine builders are in much demand due to decades of undervaluing and under-resourcing certain skill sets.

With generations of missing links, there can be real knock on effects for client requests for anything from demo rigs to bespoke industrial and production cells and stations within factories.

Today we brainstormed possible solutions for an extremely persnickety and difficult to handle part of a process.  Here you’ll see moulds from the shelf of past developments at PPL Engineering.

Shelf after shelf of parts and pieces for fitting, making, and testing machines and processes.

Welcome to an old school mind palace where you can check ideas in and out of the library, and where archives offer many nuggets.

There’s no part too big or too small here, so experience, drawings and indeed the drawing board are used for trial and error to develop pieces and machines to client specifications.

Walking out of the fascinating machine builders den and back onto the courtyard on a bright and breezy autumnal day, I was greeted by the mill’s chimney.

This reminded me of a jaw dropping show of yesteryear, some of you may remember Fred Dibnah the first time around.  This documentary about a steeplejack went on to receive many well deserved awards.

You may be lost for words when you realise exactly what he’s signed up for!

We’ve quoted recently for a new and exciting project involving a sculpture, music, water, and sound.

Quite the mystery isn’t it?  What I can share is that these beautiful and intricate domes provide inspiration from the past.

Indeed, style never fades.  Nor do engineering fundamentals.  All over the world, scientists, architects, engineers, artists, musicians, therapists, practitioners, chefs etc etc etc delve into the histories of their disciplines to recapture, reprise, and reconcile gems of the past into modern works.

Such is the organic nature of research and development.

Following on with the theme of Persian domes, researchers over at MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts are exploring the complex geometry of structures in the Lut Desert of Iran.

Using local materials, these bathhouses remain engineering feats as a greenhouse on Mars would require the exact same tenets to succeed:

a. a closed clean water system
b. an open-air water flow circulation
c. a water reservoir
d. safe power access
e. the isolation of interior life
f. the insulation of temperature & humidity from extreme external environments

Once again, the human experience involves symmetry between past and present endeavours.

Check out the MIT lab for more!

https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/persian-domes-for-human-space-exploration-on-mars/overview/

Throughout human history people have been fascinated by the idea of teleportation, whether it be with raw materials and vehicles or with spiritual mechanisms such as tarot and intuition.

Enjoy one particularly creative and playful take on teleportation over at MIT lab.  Re-imagining interfaces may one day facilitate the vicarious touch at the very least.

See what you think, or should that be, what you feel?