PermaKent Permaculture Ideas of J. Kent Hastings

The RepRap Project (RepRap stands for “Replicating Rapid Prototyper”) has created a free open source “3D printer” machine that extrudes a fast setting plastic material suitable for building many products such as mechanical gears, tracks, wheels, gaskets, brackets, wine glasses, children’s toys, adult toys, keyboards, fasteners, hangers, enclosures, door stops, caps, connectors, levels (water in clear plastic), salad tongs, rulers, T-squares, rope, vases, coin sorters & etc.

Free designs for these and many other items will likely be encoded as software easily loaded into the RepRap, and will be improved by members of its design community like any popular open source project. It’s been called “China on the desktop” and may make costly trips, in terms of fuel and inflated prices, to shopping centers obsolete.

Except for $300 worth of off-the-shelf components, the device has finally built all the custom parts needed to make a functional copy of itself, which was set to making parts for a “grandchild” device almost immediately by the RepRap team. Thus owners of a RepRap can look forward to building copies for their neighbors who can do the same for their neighbors.

So what does this have to do with permaculture? David Holmgren talks about “Self Reliance As A Political Act” on page 87 of his recent book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, and what could be more self reliant than an open source factory that also copies itself?

The project’s website has “Wealth Without Money” as its tagline, which should be a subtle hint about the goals of the RepRap team.

[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment…”
- The front page of The Guardian, November 25, 2006.

When Dana Blankenhorn wrote a critical blog post about the project back in 2005, he said that “CNN had been taken in by the hype.” His main criticism was that it’s just a prototyper, not capable of mass production.

You’re not going to get rich making one of something. You get rich making a lot of something.

His analysis reminds me of Microsoft’s 1995 reaction to Netscape: “It’s only a browser.” One of RepRap’s creators, Adrian Bowyer, commented on Blankenhorn’s post:

“But it’s not a factory.”

And a seed is not a field of crops…

Bringing us back to a gardening metaphor. How appropriate.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Freedom, Self Reliance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.