Joe Gerads has owned a shop for 25 years, mostly doing short-run production and taking on odd jobs that others typically shy away from. He uses his two PCNC 1100s (Megan I and Megan II) to work on everything from building high-end furniture out of exotic woods to farm equipment repairs to developing custom components for his mills.

As many brick-and-mortar stores are seeing sales drift online and websites like Kickstarter are helping to decide where the market is headed, personal manufacturing has moved from the wave of the future to a tool of production. The “Now Economy” has produced consumers that expect their goods to be high-quality and arrive quickly, which can sometimes be a challenge for traditional manufacturers.

Two years ago, we covered how Frankie Flood uses his PCNC 1100 to make various industrial arts projects and even hot-rod pizza cutters for celebrity chefs. Flood is a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where he runs the university’s Digital Craft Research Lab (DCRL). “I also teach courses in a newly formed program at the university, called Digital Fabrication and Design,” Flood explains. Because the Digital Fabrication program is an applied program in design, it’s offered to Art students as a BA in Art, but also to Engineering students as a certificate program.

Here at Tormach, we consider our machines to be prosumer – meaning, they marry the concerns of cost and quality. Because of this, our products are found at a unique intersection between hobbyists (those that use the machines for fun or at-home projects) and professionals (those who make a business out of machine ownership).

Anybody who has ever worn glasses knows the struggle when your new specs don’t quite fit correctly - the bridge is too tight, the frame is too wide, they fall off your face, etc. That’s why Randy Barnett created Indivijual Eyewear, a company that custom produces eyeglasses for the 80 percent of us that just don’t fit into bulk-design frames.

Frankie Flood is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus and teaches in the Jewelry and Metalsmithing area within the Peck School of the Arts. A classically-trained jewelry artist, Flood’s interest in CNC began in the machine shop while attending the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.