No Second Acts?

"I felt empowered. This is the stuff that turns dreams into reality"

No Second Acts?
August 3, 2004
By Bill Machrone
Source

Late in life, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." Maybe that was true in his day; if you didn't make it the first time around, nobody gave you a second chance. But today, people reinvent themselves all the time. And even the most successful aren't content to rest on their laurels.

The late Eli Callaway, for instance, retired from a Fortune 100 company and founded the successful winery that bears his name. Then he revolutionized golf with his Big Bertha drivers.

Closer to home, Jim Lewis created a DOS program, Tornado Notes, which evolved into the Windows-based personal information manager and freeform database Info Select. Now up to version 8, Info Select is still my favorite environment for note taking and instantaneous retrieval of anything. But Jim is much more than a programmer, and like Callaway, he keeps turning his interests and hobbies into companies.

Unlike many programmers, Lewis is very much involved in the physical world. At one of his start-ups, eMachineShop, you can download a powerful yet straightforward CAD program to design objects. You then specify the material and submit your design to the site, and eMachineShop will price it according to the materials and machining or forming difficulty, along with the number of steps involved in manufacturing and finishing. The available materials range from every imaginable kind of plastic to metals such as aluminum, brass, and steel. You can specify bending, drilling, milling, turning, and various other operations. You can also specify finishes, including plating and powder coating.

The eMachineShop software prices your job on the spot, while the 3D rendering is on your screen. You find out what your part or run of parts will cost you in minutes, not days. When you give the okay, eMachineShop makes your parts and ships them to you. It's a full-capability fabrication facility that you pay for on an as-needed basis. Customers have created both simple and complex parts; you can see some photos on the site.

Lewis wasn't content to stop at mechanical fabrication. His goal is to be a one-stop product development facility. "As Amazon is to books I want to be to manufacturing," he says. Since more and more devices contain electronics, it made sense to offer circuit board fabrication too. You can go to sites like www.pcbexpress.com and order up a run of single-layer or multilayer circuit boards, but you have to be sufficiently knowledgeable to generate files that will control their drilling and routing equipment.

So Lewis created the Web site Pad2Pad, where you can design your board with simple downloadable software, place parts, run traces, spot holes, and connect layers. Like eMachineShop, Pad2Pad prices your work in advance and actually assembles the boards from a large inventory of parts instead of delivering solder-ready boards.

Of course, Pad2Pad can't stock all of the millions of electronic components, especially the more esoteric integrated circuits, but it can leave holes or surface-mount pads on the board for you to stuff or solder to. Pad2Pad is still in launch mode, and Lewis is expanding the parts inventory. He plans to connect with a major parts distributor, thus gaining access to just about anything you can put on a circuit board.

I tried a simple circuit, the heart of a distortion pedal for electric guitar. It took me less than an hour to learn the software, lay out the circuit board, and place the parts. Pad2Pad then told me how much the board would cost for 2-, 4-, or 15-day delivery. Start-up costs and quantity discounts are built-in, and with a simple design like mine, ten boards cost only about twice as much as one.

A one-off board is fairly expensive; you'd have to want it badly. But the quantity prices quickly become very reasonable. Suddenly, that 25- or 100-piece manufacturing run seems quite feasible, even tempting. As you increase the number of boards in your order, the number of days for delivery inches up, but you can always pay a premium for fast turnaround.

Designing a part to be machined by eMachineShop is harder, because you have to work in three dimensions. I chose to duplicate a small brass part that I'd recently made on my benchtop milling machine, and I could almost have made one in the time I took to draw it. But if you take shipping costs and a black oxide-plated finish into account, eMachineShop wins hands down when you want quantities.

I often react emotionally to the products I test, but eMachineShop and Pad2Pad stirred something different in me: I felt empowered. This is the stuff that turns dreams into reality