Word: powder
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Tucked away in an unremarkable industrial building on the outskirts of town is a little machine about the size of a three-drawer filing cabinet. There's a curious Willy Wonka look to it. Feed a bit of metal powder into its maw, and after a moment of whirring and digesting, it spits out, say, a valve for a diesel engine or a gear for a car transmission or a pump component for a hot tub. It's an odd bit of industrial alchemy to watch--mere dust transforming itself into highly refined hardware...
...little machine in West Lebanon is known as a powder metallurgy press, and to most manufacturers, there ought to be nothing especially new about it. Powder presses have been around for 70 years, stamping out everything from truck-motor parts to medical equipment. Remarkably common though they are, these machines are remarkably crude. Most powder presses are great, loud, chugging things, about the size and shape of a tractor trailer and demanding the ministrations of at least 200 people to keep them running through a workweek. Retooling the presses to switch from making one component to another can take days...
...measure, a renaissance in manufacturing is long overdue. Traditional powder presses are not the only low-tech way parts have been built over the years; stamping machines, casting machines and forging machines are used to melt or muscle metal into shape. Not only are these machines imprecise, they are also fantastically expensive and hard to come by. A start-up company that wants to manufacture parts for a new product may have to wait two years for a press to be built and delivered. Not exactly the quick turnaround time we've come to expect in the age of silicon...
...dining hall gives you lemon powder, don't make lemonade...
...piled up into something looking like a ransom note. Bush could see what was happening, so when a question came about the Texas Governor's national ambitions, he fired his response not to the questioner in the crowd but directly at Doerr. "I hope you'll keep your powder dry, John," said Bush. "I hope you'll keep an open mind...