[TML] Personal Armor Noise was Re: Current USAF fleet

[Tom B]

>  > http://www.csiro.au/news/PerfectKilogramMediaRelease.html
>  >
>  > This story would indicate to me that the very best modern things are
>  > still hand made and not mass produced. At the same time, I am sure
>  > that they are using machines to help but this is no line job, the
>  > masters are at work here!
>
>  That was my original point.  Using the *same* technology, the best
>  handcrafted will always be better quality than the best mass produced.

I'm curious how anyone considers the story above an example of
hand-crafting. You'd have to be fairly broad to include the
fabrication techniques here as 'hand crafting'.

Is hand-crafting strictly defined by having humans involved in
manufacturing? If so, many modern mass-produced items fit. They have
extensive Quality Assurance tests and inspections in some types of
mass produced goods.

Or is 'hand crafting' strictly defined as not having humans involved
in the production, testing and verification excluded? This fails for
most modern mass produced items since some human designers were
obviously involved in developing the prototype and doing the machine
setup (CAD/CAM work) along with human designers having produced the
design in the first place.

Or do we have to make hand-crafting simply defined as 'something of
which only one copy of any item is produced, with no mass production'?

There are many things we could not make without machine assistance.
Period. And there are many sorts of things in the computer world that
*we would not make* if there was no mass production because mass
production produces the economic/business case to justify the effort.
So saying that hand-crafting is always better is an awful
generalization. There are plenty of cases where that just does not
apply because it would never lead to *any* sort of product.

And if you further restrict hand crafting to hand tools, vs.
computerized lathes and fabricators driven by software and analyzed
for quality by further computer driven devices, then you really do
have many cases where a craftsman may well NOT equal the quality of
even a mass-produced item. The craftsman only has to make one mistake
sometimes to reduce the value of his work. The computer driven
automated system doesn't make those sorts of mistakes once properly
configured.

For making one-off of anything, even in the modern day, there is a lot
of human involvement. We don't yet have a lot of machines designing
things, building them and inspecting them all by themselves. So in a
sense, most one-off products (and most mass-market products) are still
'hand-crafted'.

>  Interestingly, I found a major flaw with that article.  First they say they
>  want it "defined in terms of a fundamental constant of nature so anyone
>  anywhere can reproduce them".  Then talking about the sphere, they say "The
>  only people who can make [it] are our colleagues at CSIRO¹s ACPO".  Seems to
>  kind of defeat the point.

The latter probably refers to design, the former to production. Only
CSIRO could have come up with the particular approach to the problem,
but once they've got it worked out, then everyone else can crank them
out if they're careful about whatever process limits the CSIRO guys
advise. That's my take on that (but you are right it seems misleading,
and my read is inference so it could be wrong).

T.