(no subject)

From: Marshall Burns (Ennex  Corporation)
To: Ian Gibson (University of Hong Kong)
Cc: RP-ML
Date: Monday, February 27, 1995
Dear Ian,
On Mon, 27 Feb 1995, Ian Gibson wrote:
> You appear to be at odds with yourself Marshall. In some articles you say 
> that everybody should have an RP machine in their home and now you say that 
> the vendors should maintain their overinflated costing system. How can we 
> expect anyone to treat them as anything but an expensive luxury until the 
> costs come down to similar prices to those of other CNC machines?

     It is true that there will come a day when people will have fabricators 
in their homes. This day may be 10 to 20 years in the future. Today, 
fabricators are industrial machines. For what they do and the market that 
exists to support them, they are not overly costly. While there do exist 
small, bench-top CNC mills and lathes that sell in the neighborhood of 
$10,000 and even less, the bulk of the CNC market is for machines that 
range from about $75,000 to several hundred thousand dollars, the same 
price range as for today's additive fabricators.

> Manufacturers in HK are generally uncreative, 

     If this true, then they are not qualified prospects for using 
fabricators, whose prime advantage is in unlocking the bottleneck to new
product design imposed by old-fashioned modeling techniques.

> these machines are being handled with kid gloves with industry being 'kept 
> away from the coal face for their own good'.

     This is also not a good sign. If industry is never shown the 
advantages of getting their own fingernails dirty with these machines, 
why would they ever invest money to buy one?

     Ian, please don't take my comments as unfriendly. I would love to 
see dozens and hundreds of fabricators in use in Hong Kong as much as you 
would. Frankly, I doubt HK manufacturers lack in creativity. Americans 
used to say the same thing about the Japanese until we got our asses 
whipped by their onslaught of new, creative product designs. You must 
work with Hong Kong industry to show them how fabricators and other 
related technologies will help them advance into the 21st-century 
manufacturing paradigm.