Maine is where the line between 'manufacturers' and 'makers' disappears
There's a line somewhere between manufacturers and makers. I'm not sure where it is but it seems to reside somewhere in Maine.
Our cover story on Custom Composite Technologies illustrates how even a small technology manufacturer can have a big impact. The company is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a prototype for a solar car. It has created components used in Oracle Team USA's super high-tech, lightning fast America's Cup yacht, which has advanced sailing well beyond anything I could have conceived of as a kid, racing Lightning-class sailboats. Senior Writer | Content Specialist Lori Valigra pays the company a visit. She also stopped by L&K Manufacturing, a Bangor company that is taking 3-D printing to a new level. It is creating a 3-D printer for shoe manufacturers that could save time and money.
These companies are blurring the lines between R&D and manufacturing.
Recently, I've been reading two books by Nick Offerman, a woodworker who moonlighted as Ron Swanson on NBC's “Parks & Recreation.”
He is based in Los Angeles, but judging from “Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers” (2015), and his recent “Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Workshop,” Offerman has spent a lot of time on Maine's backroads, tracking down furniture makers, boat builders and tool manufacturers. For him, the line between “makers” and “manufacturers” appears to be a blurred line, at best.
“When you get involved with makers, you invariably rub elbows with the kind of women and men who show up with an unsolicited jar of jam or some leftover meatloaf. Bartering reenters your daily economy, which also strengthens a neighborhood,” he writes in “Good Clean Fun.”
Offerman devotes a chapter of “Good Clean Fun” to Christian Becksvoort, a New Gloucester furniture maker who has been credited with reviving Shaker-style furniture. (Becksvoort also had a cameo on “Parks & Rec,” an episode in which Ron Swanson receives an award from the Indiana Fine Woodworking Association.) Offerman and Becksvoort, in turn, took a road trip from New Gloucester to visit Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, the Warren manufacturer that produces what Offerman calls “the Cadillac of American hand tools.” Thomas Lie-Nielsen is another of Offerman's heroes; he devotes a chapter to him in “Gumption.”
Along the way, Offerman cites the influence of WoodenBoat magazine in Brooklin and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport.
The parallel between a “maker” and a “manufacturer” may be that of an entrepreneur to a corporation, but most manufacturers started with something small, often a better way of producing a familiar product.
Thomas Lie-Nielsen took over the making of a specialized woodworking tool, an edge-trimming block plan, buying tooling, plans and components from Ken Wisner, a Freeport machinist who was ready to retire, Offerman writes. Lie-Nielsen started small, in a shed in Warren, but today has more than 100 employees at a manufacturing site in Warren.
The Lie-Nielsen site offers tours, and I took part in one a couple years back. Several of the people on the tour were likely in the “maker” category, producing furniture for friends and family. But, who knows, one or two might become manufacturers at some point. They have to start somewhere.
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