considering it took this writer 9 months to make a toaster from scratch, the maker movement has very far to go. i am a 3d printing fanboy as much as anyone, but really the state of the art allows little beyond toys / frivolous things. actually useful things remain out of reach, probably because of their inherent complexity.

Hello, my name is Thomas Thwaites, and I have made a toaster.” So begins The Toaster Project, the author’s 9-month-long journey from his local appliance store to remote mines in the UK to his mother’s backyard, where he creates a crude foundry. Along the way, he learns that an ordinary toaster is made up of 404 separate parts, that the best way to smelt metal at home is by using a method found in a fifteenth-century treatise, and that plastic is almost impossible to make from scratch.

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