ENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITIES?
In these days of Covid and lockdowns, the rise in the number of those working from home has been considerable, to the point at which some businesses are embracing it as a new way of operating.
When we think of home offices, we generally imagine a spare bedroom fitted out for the purpose, because we tend to think of it as a computer workstation, desk-bound office — a scaled-down version of our pre-Covid situation; the one tied to the commute, the bought food and coffees, and the increasingly hard to find car parking spaces.
But what about the garage or shed — what degree of opportunity lies there? This is not an unusual workplace for some — small wooden items cut out with a bandsaw, single items turned on lathes, sophisticated models or patterns and moulds for a production run elsewhere, but each one created by hand as one-offs.
The possibility of taking on an order for 100 and competing with a larger commercial entity has never been a real option without capital and expensive machinery, along with the planning and production lines that accompany such an undertaking. Not to mention the compliance and resource consent issues that it would raise — or that your neighbour would raise.
“In fact, a shed that has them all has the potential to become a hub of innovation, with design and testing processes that were once the domain only of companies with deep pockets”
What if that were all to change — in the manner of the loom in the home that was taken for granted before the industrial revolution? Might there be a 21st century equivalent? Now, the loom was a one-off bespoke production tool — and a manufacturing operation in the middle of the lounge might cause other problems, particularly on the home front — but the principle is the same. Into this space comes the 3D printer, the CNC router, and potentially, the laser cutter. In this article we’re going to concentrate on the CNC
