James Rogers

My website is now live, check out ProtoDevAndFab.com for all your product development, small volume prototype production, and/or DFM consulting services!

@CalebChamberla6 I wish it was Cincinnati, but I think I'd have heard something about it locally by now if it was. I'm guessing Atlanta with Philly as a backup.

Narrowing it down... Where is OSH Cut East?

@ADoricko Yeah, this is a bop - nice recommendation!

@ADoricko open.spotify.com/track/1CSNaLDJ…

🚨 In case you missed it 🚨 Let me put you onto this modern rendition of a Byzantine chant commemorating the renowned Roman commander Belisarius He reunited Rome for his emperor after campaigning around the fallen empire over. Underrated European hero of old

i don't begrudge sam for saying this, having people come after u and ur family in ur home is more than enough justification. but i think he's lying, and i think it's quite bad that instead of engaging and grappling with these policy issues openai is choosing to ignore and mislead. we as a country need to be figuring out how the fuck to handle this, what society should or could look like, and burying our heads in the sand is not going to help. it makes it much harder to coordinate political will when one of the AI leaders makes placating statements like this, "everything will shake out fine, weird transition but things will be alright". the only way humans have long-term meaningful contributions to the economy is if we hit hard walls on the generality or cost of artificial intelligence. you do not get humans directing agents towards goals if the models are better than the humans at very human shaped tasks like "managing others to achieve a goal" and "determining which goals to pursue". sure, if we have aligned models perhaps those goals are implicitly or explicitly determined by human desires, but that doesn't mean we have any real day to day or week to week or month to month input on how to get there. "comparative advantage" cmon man. think about it. that only actually makes sense in a world we're hard limited on compute. a country's population grows very slowly, it has meaningful opportunity cost on the labor it does. if it turns out we can really only support five Mythos 9 instances running globally then sure, maybe they'll spend their time directing humans. but realistically why would you pay a human for a task rather than just another model instance, maybe weaker maybe not? why would you be interested in outputs that come 100x slower, that require massively more double checking and verification, that can't be coordinated with and steered except over incredibly bandwidth inefficient channels? nah just spawn another instance!! and if the reason we're doing this is truly that every GPU is maxxed out running full tilt... then the *work* humans are going to be doing isn't then can't "directing agent swarms", it can't be "creative and high value intellectual labor utilizing the full value of AI". the models have the advantage there, so we're spending our time as exogenous bio-compute, mechanical turks for the machines, shifting around uninterpretable bits succession style. hardly a vision of the future we want. maybe the answer is physical or relational. we can do things in the real world that machines can't, we have meaning to other humans that they don't. granting that for a moment, ignoring the looming shadow of increasingly functional humanoid robotics and superstimulus companions, what does that economy actually *look like*? humans as factory workers and nurses who are always looking down at their phone or listening in their earpiece for the next instruction from chatgpt 9.4-mini? artists?? a whole economy of artists?? humans don't seem to value art enough *now* for many to be able to make a living off it. it's very tough for me to see *who is paying* here! we relegate humans to exclusively low paid and low impact jobs, for which their value is exclusively to each other. meanwhile the models have discovered a cure for cancer. how exactly do the artists scrape enough together from their circular human-value economy to afford the cancer cure? if the machines are just *giving* us the cancer cure, then we're *not* buying it, and clearly our jobs and economic intuitions are in fact irrelevant! we're working under a totally different system. and we have yet to figure out what that system *is* or how to get there.

The democratization of increasingly sophisticated manufacturing technologies is wonderful to see. The metal must flow!

@connorkapoor Med device / robotics seems to rely a lot on metal injection molding these days for components that once would have been pressed and sintered PM.

(🧵3/4) Luckily, the powdered metal market has been adopted by additive manufacturing, but it's still not a viable large-scale manufacturing method, primarily due to cost. I see a large opportunity here to service the nascent robotics industry. The robotics industry is still using prototype-scale manufacturing methods for production, they will quickly learn they need high wear, durable, structural components at low cost and large scale (that's what originally led to the invention of powder metallurgy for automotive)

There's a critical manufacturing sector that's in rapid decline, and no one is talking about it. (A 🧵 1/4) Since 2019, 33% (13 of the 45) of the US companies that produce powder-metallurgy parts have closed. These businesses are closing RAPIDLY in the US, primarily due to workforce aging out, lack of reinvestment into facilities and automation to be able to keep up with offshore prices. Powder metallurgy is a manufacturing process that uses specialized molding and sintering to produce structural and wear parts for the automotive, medical, and aerospace sectors.

@MachinaLabs_ Totally get the benefits of design flexibility and rapid iteration without tooling, but how does this process compete against more traditional mfg processes (e.g. hydro forming) once you've transitioned from prototype to production volumes of the same consistent shape?

Warfare is shifting from $100M fighter jets to $40K drones. The U.S. needs manufacturing that can match that cost curve, fast.

@JonFettigJFM @gak_pdx @zodiaceng @_baldtires @cultcrew What ceramic media is your preference for this kind of thing?

@gak_pdx @zodiaceng @_baldtires @cultcrew 100%

@_baldtires use green cones from C&M Topline for tumbling aluminum. The tumbled finish wasn't shown in this edit but I'll dig some up and post in the comments. @cultcrew instagram.com/p/Cq_kH7hgxjx/

@Xaraphim @_baldtires @fishPointer @grok @kegrocket Explosion forming may be worth looking at...

@_baldtires @fishPointer @grok @kegrocket sheittttttt I know there’s some guy in China who has one And I know that I can design an entire chamber if I wanted to it would still be like 50% cheaper than a machine one and just as good thanks

blame @fishPointer for this tangent i brought my old electron gun into this assembly just to understand how this camber could work and what not, and honestly im sure this chamber can work rough math says that for high vac, (10^-8torr), the pressure load is still basically just 1 atmosphere from the outside so structurally it is not like the chamber gets crushed harder just because the vacuum level is better the shell would probably need to be around 8–10 mm thick as a starting point, depending on diameter, material, ports, flange design, and how conservative you want to be. the basic idea is two large formed domes with flanges these could be made with a big ass press, spun, or hydroformed depending on the supplier and diameter once the domes are formed, you could either weld on heavy flange rings or design the lip so the flange surface can be machined directly into it the flange is probably the more critical part than the dome itself, because it has to stay flat enough to hold the seal and not become a potato chip under bolt preload or atmospheric load *not modeled but this would need like 30-40 bolts on the flange* reinforcing the chamber would also be pretty simple if needed you could add external stiffener rings around the dome, near the equator/flange area, and reinforce any ports or viewports with welded pads or collars plus the dome shape already helps a lot because it puts most of the load into membrane compression instead of bending you would need a metal that forms well, welds cleanly, and has good vacuum behavior. it needs low outgassing, low contamination risk, and it should not become a pain in the ass during bakeout or cleaning. stainless steel is the obvious option, but there may be cheaper steels that work if the vacuum requirement, cleaning process, and contamination limits are not extreme a 2m diameter chamber machined from billet or thick plate would be absurd a chamber of that size machine from billet would easily become a HIGH six figure part once you include material, CNC time, welding, sealing surfaces, ports, and inspection. a formed dome is just way more economically viable you buy two formed stainless heads, add flange rings, machine only the sealing faces, weld on the ports, and reinforce only where needed savings could realistically be something like 50–80 percent sombody try this at small scale plz

@joshgworks @Xaraphim I'd love a link to whatever you can share as well. I've been interested in this area for awhile too but have never had an application come up in any of my work so far.

@Xaraphim @rogersj3 Let me filter through the stuff that is not controlled and I will hit you up.

there’s this idea i keep coming back to, like a composite “billet” approach start with a solid carbon fiber preform where the fibers are already laid in the directions the finished part needs, then you just CNC the final geometry out of it if you got the fiber architecture right from the start it would have an internal structure that follows the load paths through the component, which is the part i find interesting with metals you machine from billet and the material is basically isotropic, doesn’t matter what direction you cut. composites aren’t like that, the material only works when fibers are aligned with the loads, IN THEORY if you build a nearsolid block with fibers already oriented correctly and then machine from that, you end up with something way more structurally optimized than a conventional laminate…right???? the catch is machining cuts fibers every pass interrupts reinforcement you placed intentionally, so this only really makes sense if the preform is already close to final geometry and the fiber paths were designed around that shape from the beginning

@cadbitch Nice, good stuff

I gots the goods yo.

@Xaraphim Outside the realm of my personal experience, but grok pulled up a few papers you might find interesting: x.com/i/grok/share/f…

@rogersj3 do you know if there’s any research on this in regards to composites? specifically fiber composites

@__el__toro__ I have a similar set and it still sees occasional use as well. Mine was my grandfather's who retired from GM as a tool and die man after spending his whole working career for them in various plants.

Don't know where I ever got this set. It's very old. The material is falling apart. It smells like the past. Still use it from time to time, though.

@codyaims What did J&J do to earn its place on this list for you?

Map showing air traffic in 1903.

@HiLanden Ok, currently outside my wheelhouse but best of luck!

@rogersj3 Production

Any shops looking for work? Friend has 3 months of RFQs he can send out. 3/4 axis mill

@arram Sounds good, the weight is reasonable. What constraints do you have in terms of packaging the drive elements (wall standoff distance, etc.)? Is this intended to be permanently installed in one location or hung like a large painting and (relatively) easily moved?

@rogersj3 Not sure what the mass is - it will have 74 0.6mm bronze plates over it. Main requirement is that it will need to be rigid. Will DM you.

Does anyone know a good mechanical Eng for hire? I’m working on a new version of my art and need a 4’ wall-mounted base that rotates at 0.5 to 5RPM in dead silence. Ideally it would be parametric in Fusion360. x.com/arram/status/1…