-=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to Leonard Erickson <=-

 RJT> Leonard Erickson wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:
 
 RJT> Been thinking about this stuff again,  and how technology has pushed
 RJT> all sorts of things forward,  especially in recent years... 
 RJT> Do you see this as changing,  any?  It would seem to me that
 RJT> technology ought to be able to push this "barrier" back
some,  at the
 RJT> very least. 
 
 LE> Well, you either have to "machine" parts, use fairly standard 
 LE> "folded" metal cases, or use "molded" parts.
And injection molding
 LE> is currently the only practical way to mold plastic plarts for many
 LE> purposes.
 
 LE> Alas, the molds required are fairly high precision blocks of solid 
 LE> steel. That's required by the pressures and temps involved. Which
 LE> makes them expensive.

 RJT> Are solid steel molds really required for one-off or low-volume runs, 
 RJT> though? 

They are required for injection molding. When running the molds are at
a few hundred degrees and under a *lot* of pressure (hundreds of psi).

And because the expense of making them, you don't *do* low volume, much
less "one off" runs.

 LE> There's no method that's cheap for low volume use.

 RJT> I wonder,  but then I don't know enough about manufacturing processes,
 RJT> which all seem to be geared toward high-volume anyway. 

 LE> And, of course if they ever get molecular assemblers/fabricators to
 LE> work, all bets are off. No, this isn't "nano-technology". At least
 LE> not in the normal sense. These would be "normal" sized devices that
 LE> build objects one atom or molecule at a time.

 RJT> The people who make chips and such stuff are bumping into limits all
 RJT> the time,  and figuring out ways around it. 

Oh, we *could* build stuff up a molecule at a time with tech we could
build easily enough. But it'd take a few hundred years to buiuld
anything big enough to handle. :-)


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