"When designing something for small scale manufacturing, you usually end up with a product that can disassembled to be fixed."

I miss Local Motors. The idea of a DIY automotive manufacturing company devolved into a cute little driverless bus manufacturer for corporate campuses, and dissolved into ignominy after producing one of the most amazing off-road racing vehicles ever conceived: the Rally Fighter.

They went from that to this.

Apparently, they quit letting people vote on what to make, abandoning the wisdom of the crowd for the rationality of bean counters.

I have had people tell me that the engine in their car needed to be removed from the car to change the distributor cap, spark plugs, or oil filter. These kinds of engineering issues clearly are intended to make working on your own car impossible. I used a 40+ year old truck as my daily driver for years, and intend to bring it back to usability (I live right on the ocean, and the body has become afflicted with rust to an unacceptable degree), but am giving a lot of thought to remodeling. While my VW caddy managed to get many things done, the bed was too small for 4x8 sheets of material, which made me struggle to carry loads on top of the canopy (and to keep them dry in the monsoon season, i.e. fall, winter, and spring), and while the canopy was low enough to enable me to stack material on it, it was so low that getting things out from under it was like doing the limbo with an anvil in your hands.

Getting parts for 40 year old mechanically fuel injected foreign truck is also becoming more challenging. I have long ago replaced the headlight switch with a dash mounted toggle, gave up on the dome light, picked up all the pieces of the tail light lens and superglued them back together after bumping a stump, and etc. I considered just coating all the body panels with fiberglass, but the additional weight would turn the snappy little truck into a lumbering slug. I have a 3D printer, but snapping ~200mm pieces together to make a new body makes me giggle at the sheer absurdity of it. Neither would PLA, nor exotic carbon fiber blends, be able to support the ~1/2 ton or so I have lugged on top of that canopy in the past. While such a body wouldn't rust, it might blow apart in a stiff breeze. I have considered replacing the glued together tail light lens with a 3D printed one, but it's working fine, so I am not inspired to fix it.

I really want a robot arm I can mount that print head on that can print body panels, but I don't want to spend $40k on a robot arm either. It's kinda weird being between not being able to contemplate 3D printing something, and being able to actually 3D print something. Born too late to conquer the New World. Born too early to conquer the stars.

I have, however, in the last week gained access to a building with 5 garage bays at no charge, and my feeble neurons are both banging against each other as I struggle to conceive of possibilities.

I will come up with something.

Thanks!