Manufacturing guy-at-large.

NYIC equipment for sale

Added on by Spencer Wright.

The New York Industrial Collective, which I have run in various forms since 2018, is shutting down in the coming months. As a result, I’m selling a fairly extensive collection of tooling and equipment. A spreadsheet is available upon request, which you can send to me here; you can also see some (hastily taken and minimally staged) photos of some of the available equipment below.

Three books

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Three books I’ve read (all on audio) recently:

The Periodic Table; by Primo Levi, read by Neville Jason.

I feel as if I am reading Levi in reverse: Starting with Other People’s Trades a few months ago, then moving to The Periodic Table, perhaps soon arriving at If This Is A Man. In the first, Levi’s own life is relatively abstract; in If This Is A Man, (whose title in the US was Survival in Auschwitz) I assume I would come to understand what must have been formative experiences for him. The Periodic Table is somewhere in the middle. He refers to Auschwitz obliquely in a few chapters, and writes about his time in the Monowitz Buna Werke at the end of the book. But other chapters resemble allegory, and others are simply charming vignettes from his youth. I will admit that I was not as enamored with the book’s structure as I had hoped, but I did feel as if I came closer to the parts of Levi’s life that I clearly want to learn about.

The Year of Magical Thinking; by Joan Didion, read by Barbara Caruso.

I have never read Joan Didion, and I’m told that The Year of Magical Thinking is perhaps a distinct element in her writing career. I found it to be a compelling listen, and blasted through it in a few meditative sessions. Didion both shows and tells the reader what she experienced during said Year — which, if you weren’t already aware, included the death of her husband and also a series of intense medical tribulations endured by her daughter. Didion tells through uncannily precise self-reflection, which I take it is something she was known for. She shows through the choral repetition of a string of out-of-context phrases and quotations, all of which add up to a feeling of dissociative fugue.

Everything Is Illuminated; by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Robert Petkoff.

I have read this book at least twice before: Once in paper when I was in college, and once on audiobook sometime in my later twenties or early thirties. I have found it incredibly affecting every time.

I am not very Jewish. I have barely stepped foot into a synagogue, have only been to a Seder once, and was told repeatedly, by my one arguably Jewish ancestor, that he did not consider himself to be Jewish. And yet I am, ethnically, twenty-five percent Ashkanazi, and it feels as if there is within me a cultural hole where my Ashkanazi ancestors (who were murdered, in pogroms, around the turn of the twentieth century) once were.

By that same token, Jonathan Safran Foer (either the author or the ostensibly fictionalized protagonist of Everything Is Illuminated) is not very Ukranian. In an interview with the New York Times, Foer said that writing Everything Is Illuminated “was a way of coming to peace with an absence in my life.” About the real trip to Ukraine which he took in 1997, Foer had this to say: “What I found was nothing but nothing. There weren't even people to ask questions of, or gravestones to light candles by. What I found was one, huge hole.”

I think that it is this which I have found so affecting: The knowledge that no matter how much I dig, a big part of my own family history — and of all of our histories, as the Alex character so poignantly shows in Everything Is Illuminated — will remain mostly an absence.

Three books

Added on by Spencer Wright.

More books completed!

Beowulf: A New Translation; translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, read by JD Jackson.

I thought this book was pretty cool. Recommended to me by a reader for its (prolific) use of the word bro, Headley’s translation (and JD Jackson’s reading) is brash and yet somehow hospitable. It brought me in; it kept me interested; it energized me. I didn’t know the story beforehand: At a high level, it is about a Swedish (Geat) hero who kills a monster, is almost killed by its mother, and [spoiler alert] later dies in an epic fight with a dragon. Transcribed from oral tradition in around 1000 AD, the poem exists today in a single (partially burned) manuscript. Headley’s translation made it accessible in ways I would not have expected, and I blasted through the four-ish-hour reading in a couple of days.

In Praise of Shadows; by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker.

I believe I have read this book twice before, and at one point I owned two copies of it; I have since given one away. Its content is somewhere in between The Unknown Craftsman and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but I found its approach more honest, in the sense that Tanizaki seems to be communicating his opinions on aesthetics (and women, and jade, and pooping) rather than attempting to define and argue for a unified objective theory of them. His narrative wanders; I found his thoughts on architecture the most compelling and least problematic, though his descriptions of persimmon leaf sushi and black lacquerware soup bowls are also appealing. But perhaps my favorite line in the book came from the afterward, in which the Tanizaki’s wife recounted an anecdote about him after his death. He had decided to build a new house; the architect arrived for a meeting and proudly announced that he knew In Praise of Shadows and was prepared to build a house that fit Tanizaki’s desires perfectly. “But no, I could never live in a house like that,” Tanizaki replied. In Praise of Shadows is a rant, muttered by a self-described old man who is mourning the traditions of an earlier Japanese culture. There is truth in it, but it shouldn’t be taken as a guide to live one’s life by.

The Paris Review No. 246; various authors.

I purchased this issue of The Paris Review after much deliberation at a surprisingly charming book store in Miami, Florida. Ada and I had walked, then biked, then taken a car to get there, partly to buy books (between the flight down and a little time on the beach, I had finished both Eastbound and Need for the Bike that weekend) and partly to get the fuck out of South Beach, with its charmingly old-fashioned architecture and its not-quite-NYC-cool restaurants. When we arrived at the book store — Books & Books, in Coral Gables — we were both hungry and got a snack at their restaurant. We successfully ordered the hummus we wanted, but they were out of both the curried chicken salad and then the baba ghanoush, so we got some rather unsatisfying labneh instead. It was a warm afternoon in January, and we were sitting in the courtyard, and Ada ordered a white wine. I ordered a kombucha but received the same white wine, which I drank obediently and without displeasure.

After our snack we paid, then went inside to look for books. Ada decided promptly; she was nearing the end of a loaned copy of a “fiercely romantic, irresistibly sexy” fantasy novel, and wanted the next book in the series for when she was done. I undertook a more intense search. I thought about getting a copy of Dante’s Inferno, and was egged on by a college-aged kid who overheard my deliberations, but decided I would fare better with a different translation. I poked around the nonfiction section but was uninspired; I thumbed through almost their entire literary fiction collection but couldn’t commit. Finally I returned to the cafe (by this time Ada had paid for her book) and peered past a customer working on their laptop to scan the periodicals. A glossy magazine wouldn’t do, and we already had copies of The New Yorker and The Atlantic at home, but the blood-red cover of The Paris Review — a publication that I was vaguely aware of but wouldn’t have been able to describe in any detail — stared passively out from the shelves, indifferent to my interests but presumably capable of teaching me something.

And, I enjoyed reading it. It felt a little more focused on the writing than The New Yorker, whose house style is distinctive and literary but which also puts a lot of effort into being informative, entertaining, and stylish. To be clear, these traits make The New Yorker singularly great to me, but The Paris Review felt a little more angular, challenging, and focused — in a way that I liked. The first piece in this issue, by Sean Thor Conroe, excerpts journal entries he made during a failed attempt to walk across the country after having dropped out of college. Both ecstatic and deeply anxious, Conroe’s piece left me on a hopeful note, but also gave me the sense of looking over someone’s shoulder as they made a series of dubious life choices. A few pages later, an interviewer (who is named in the introduction, but who is listed only as “INTERVIEWER” above question after probing question) talks with Yu Hua, who Wikipedia claims is “one of the greatest living authors in China,” about life experiences spanning from the Cultural Revolution to today. The questions are almost painfully short (“Do you often cry when you write?”), a pattern that seems like it might be The Paris Review’s house style (it repeats in a later interview with the poet Louise Glück). At one point Hua’s interviewer (who had worked as a translator for the English version of Hua’s most successful novel) mentions, almost in monosyllables, that they had yet to receive a single royalty payment for their work.

I felt distinctly sophisticated reading The Paris Review in public. Around the middle of the 200-ish-page paperbound text, whose back cover advertises a list of upcoming book titles from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the writing became almost shockingly edgy in Tony Tulathimutte’s Ahegao, which deals with its protagonist’s sexual repression and ultimate humiliation with humor, empathy, and little apparent concern for its readers’ potentially puritanical proclivities. Which is to say that it’s graphic as fuck. But somehow fun to read! The next story is a tender and heartbreakingly remembered pseudo-romance between a pair of retired flight attendants; then comes the aforementioned interview with Glück; finally comes (I’m skipping the poetry and full-color visual art, though I enjoyed them as palette cleansers) another sexually graphic, then achingly romantic, then touching and meditative story called Two Men, Mary by Jamie Quatro.

It would be a little presumptuous of me to say that I’ll pick up the next issue of The Paris Review, and while I did poke at the subscription page (the quarterly costs $59 per year) I eventually closed the tab. But I do find The Paris Review’s founding editorial statement to be compelling:

The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.

Three books

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Three books I’ve read recently:

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

“Get off my lawn,” yells Benjamin. “I’m painting here.” I’m not sure what to make of his subsequent argument; I can only say that never before have I drawn as many question marks in a book’s margins, and this book is only forty-nine pages long, and almost half of them are blank (or were, until my pencil had its way with them). Benjamin is Very Upset About Film and Photography, which today feels totally quaint. In the course of berating those two artistic modes and praising live theater and painting instead, he gets quite sloppy with his rhetoric, making claims like “if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes” — a conditional statement which does not seem to follow from anything Benjamin offers about “the aura,” “its social causes,” or “the medium of contemporary perception.” He later defines “the aura of natural [objects]” as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, wile resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

Benjamin does, in due course, make a few interesting points — and his line of argumentation finds parallels (echoes?) in modern discourse on media. But I find it difficult to engage seriously with his argumentation, and its whimsey and lack of rigor indeed feel designed to quash counterarguments before they’re even made.

Essays One by Lydia Davis, read by Janet Metzger.

Listening to this book on audio was tough at times, as much of it is in verse or about subjects that I am a bit lost in. Davis analyzes Proust, Barthes, and Edward Dahlberg (all authors I have not read) at length, as well as a number of her own poems and those of other writers she admires. But she also issues a series of what I found to be convincing pieces of advice, among them the idea that writers should take notes often and on a wide range of activities. Davis seems just as likely to play with language, writing things purely for the pleasure of doing so, as she is to inspect it with the utmost care, attention, and diligence. Reading her essays was inspiring, exciting, and engrossing, and it made me want to address my own work in a more earnest — and experimental — manner.

Night by Elie Wiesel, read by George Guidall.

This is an intense book. It was made a little less intense, I think, by the fact that I listened to it on audio; then again, George Guidall’s narration was expressive, desperate, pleading. Wiesel writes his story plainly and with haste (the audiobook, which includes Wiesel’s subsequent Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and an essay about Wiesel by a French author, comes in at just over four hours), the tension and anxiety building and then slackening just enough every time Wiesel repeats the word “night.” The reader, of course, knows that the story will be horrible until the bitter end (Note: Night is about the Holocaust). Wiesel doesn’t seem to soften, heighten, or foreshadow any part it, and the book feels more effective as a result.

Three books

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Three books I’ve read recently:

Other People’s Trades by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. I have more to write about Levi, who notably was imprisoned (enslaved? abused? treated as utterly disposable?) at the Monowitz Buna factory — a synthetic rubber factory, the first of its kind, located in the Auschwitz complex. This book, though, was relatively quick to read and digest. Built out of a collection of columns he published in Italian newspapers in the later half of the twentieth century, Other People’s Trades is not, as its title might suggest, an anthropological or ethnographic study of labor. Levi’s writing here resembles foremost that of a commentator, looking out at the world from inside his own mind. He spends considerable time reflecting on his childhood, and his occupation, and then in maybe a third of the book he turns to an industry with which he has some curiosity but not much (any?) first-hand knowledge. In this way Other People’s Trades is filled with the kind of writing one sees regularly on the internet, and it takes some work for a modern reader (or, it took some work for me) to remember that Levi didn’t have access to Wikipedia, and JSTOR, and for that matter ChatGPT to give him hints about entomology, or linguistics, or whatever other topic he wanted to expound upon for a few thousands words. My favorite part of the book appears in the introduction:

The essays collected here...are the fruit of my roaming about as a curious dilettante for more than a decade. They are ‘invasions of the field’, incursions into other people’s trades, poachings in private hunting preserves, forays into the boundless territories of zoology, astronomy, and linguistics: sciences which I have never studied systematically and which, for just this reason, affect me with the durable fascination of unsatisfied and unrequited loves, and excite my instincts as a voyeur and kibitzer.

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal; translated by Jessica Moore. I found this book on the steps of the Coignet building, which I mentioned in a piece in 2021 and which still stands, unsold and partially restored, across the street from a large converted factory that apparently houses the offices of a not-for-profit press which is “devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature.” I am not in the habit of picking books up off the street, but something about this one grabbed me, and when I found myself on a three-hour flight to Miami a few weeks later with no kids and no desire to purchase wifi, I grabbed it back — and spent the next hour and a half hanging on as it shot me across most of continental Asia, turning page after furious, breathless page until the compact and engrossing story inside of it was exhausted. I was captivated with Eastbound — a novella which describes the brief and intense intersection of a few people’s lives. I found its writing especially enjoyable; it complemented the story’s ample tension perfectly.

Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel; translated by Allan Stoekl. This book was nearly as short as Eastbound, and was constructed out of even smaller pieces than Other People’s Trades. The author is, I have learned, a member of Oulipo, “a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques.” At times this book’s form feels distinctly like the thing which is driving it forward. But also, Fournel clearly loves bikes, and finds things to write about them that are at some moments personal and idiosyncratic, and at others inviting and energetic. Fournel expounds his opinions as if they should be gospel, and while many of his thoughts on French cycling culture are admittedly lost on me, I found multiple opportunities to relate to him strongly — most notably his recommendation that people who are not employed as professional athletes (which is to say, basically all of us) should, at some point in their lives, find a way to inhabit their bodies fully, devoting serious energy their sport or movement and then taking the time to appreciate the way preparation and physical action blend merge into a thoughtless, transcendent experience.


Of these three books, the one which I found most compelling was Eastbound. It did something that I didn’t expect, and it did it urgently and without caring whether I was prepared for it. It sucked me entirely into its tiny, paperbound cover, and then pushed and dragged me around inside itself.

Recently I have been thinking of Ben Thompson’s definition of a subscription business model, which hinges upon “the consistent delivery of well-defined value.” As a writer, my abilities are rather inconsistent; I am not, as Fournel would say, “in shape” as a writer, capable of seamlessly jumping into action and delivering well-defined value to readers. I’m also not in the habit of the kind of formalistic experimentation that Eastbound employs, and am unsure how one would employ de Kerangal’s immediacy and breathlessness in the kind of semi-technical nonfiction which SOW is known for. That said, I think it’s incumbent upon me to make more attempts at it, and generally to spend more time reading — and reflecting upon what I’ve read, as I’ve done here in about 800 words.

A blog post

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This evening, while sitting at the kitchen counter eating the sugar cookies that we had painstakingly and somewhat sloppily decorated there a day before, my four-year-old daughter recited the self-affirmational blessing that her pre-k class apparently chants before starting their lunches. She wanted me to repeat it, line by line, and I obliged her – up until the moment where she said, in her sweet little drawl, “I have a purpose in life.”

It is on-brand for me to bristle at the things chanted in groups which I already feel like a marginal participant in – which is to say, basically every group I’ve been a part of. But I’m not a part of my daughter’s pre-k, and I’m not sure I was bristling at her little affirmation. I was thinking, but I couldn’t possibly have a purpose in life.

Admittedly, it has been a weird couple of months. A weird couple of years! The reasons aren’t worth going into; they’d drag on for pages, and anyway it wouldn’t serve my purpose to divulge them. The point is, I think, that a large part of my life feels as if it’s been shaped largely by chance. The way I spend my time; the places from which I derive meaning; the places where try to make my mark -- I arrived at these things not via a well-executed plan but by bumbling about, barely looking where I was going.

Recently, while I was saying something about my relationship with writing, someone asked me if I thought I suffered from imposter syndrome. I honestly can’t tell; it’s not so much that I mistrust my abilities as a writer, but that I find myself more compelled by the physical problems around me.

An example: A few hours before I equivocated about my purpose in life with my four-year-old, I gave myself a half-hour break from editing (a task which makes up a significant portion of my actual job) to go and clean out the bathroom sink drain. It was a perfect task: The sink was draining like crap, and I fixed it. The biggest factor in my favor was the fact that I was willing to get just a little bit messy; once I accepted that fact and put on a pair of gloves, the project was basically finished.

One thing I’ll give myself is that when a problem is physically in front of me and not an immediate crisis, I’m reasonably resilient to the hurdles it presents. The issue is that I’m addicted to non-crisis physical hurdles.

Time

Added on by Spencer Wright.

A couple months ago I tried to write something about Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order of Time for an issue of The Prepared that I was writing. In the end I scrapped it; it was random and kind of wacky and just hard to parse. Nevertheless, I have repeatedly returned to the ideas in that book; it has helped to sculpt many of the things I’m thinking about in my most meditative (least meditative?) moments. So in the interest of just pressing publish, here goes:


In March, I wrote here about time-keeping systems. I was feeling frustrated by “daylight saving time” (which I put in scare quotes to remind the reader that no daylight is actually saved under DST), but in the end I think I came to a peaceful conclusion. “Time is our tool,” I wrote. “We may as well use it in a way that suits our needs.”

It turns out that time is a great deal more than that, though, and today my relationship with time is somewhat less peaceful. As Carlo Rovelli writes in The Order of Time, time is both intuitive and obscure, both universal and incredibly specific. We all know what it feels like to observe the passing of time, but it is not at all evident why it passes, and it would appear that the way in which it passes bears little resemblance to the way I, for one, have experienced my life thus far.

I’m not sure how these facts should change the way I approach life, much less how to talk about them with people who have not read a couple hundred dense and very heady pages written by a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity. But if this newsletter is about anything, it is about things that might change the way you look at the world, and The Order of Time has certainly had that effect on me. So hang on, friends: the bits I’ve snuck in below are both outlandish and kind of obscure, but they’ve made for great mental chewing gum for me over the past few months.

  • There is no fixed, objective concept of “the present” – a moment at which all of the stuff in the universe is happening right now. The present is a local phenomenon – technically a single point in spacetime, in practice extending to encompass a city, or a country, or all of earth. But as Rovelli writes on page 41, it makes no sense to ask “what is happening on Proxima b right now?”

  • Time appears to be, as Rovelli writes on page 132 of The Order of Time, “not part of the elementary grammar of the world.” But never fear:
    A cat is not part of the elementary ingredients of the universe. It is something complex that emerges, and repeats itself, in various parts of our planet.
    In my experience thus far, I was under the impression that time was this fundamental thing; it has been core to my understanding of the world. It turns out, though, that time is like cats. They definitely exist, and we may love them, but if we learned of an alien species who had never before heard of cats, we wouldn’t bat an eye. If you had never experienced a cat, you could still observe and understand and enjoy the universe. 

  • I was aware of the idea, theorized by Einstein as special relativity and then subsequently observed many times over, that time slows down when you speed up. But I had forgotten, or had not fully processed, the somehow weirder general relativity: that time also slows down in areas where the space-time continuum is curved. Time dilates as gravitational potential decreases – this is why time slows to a halt at the horizon of a black hole. But it’s everywhere around us, too: A clock on the floor runs slower than a clock on the table; time passes slower at your feet than it does at your head. As Rovelli writes on page ten of The Order of Time:
    Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later: the one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold…. Lower down, there is simply less time than at altitude.

  • Time is not directional; the only difference between the past and the present is that in the past, there was low entropy. 

  • One of the implications of quantum mechanics is that, as Rovelli writes on page 83 of The Order of Time, “a minimum scale exists for all phenomena.” To you, time may feel fluid; I experience time as passing seamlessly and continuously. But there is actually a minimum value for time: Planck time, or 10-44 seconds. “In other words, a minimum interval of time exists. Below this, the notion of time does not exist—even in its most basic meaning.”
    Of course, the same could be said of distance – Planck length – “the minimum limit below which the notion of length becomes meaningless. Planck length is around 10-33 centimeters.”
    This blows my mind: Distance is granular! There is a point at which distance just can’t get any smaller. Wild.

  • Rovelli writes on page 98 that:
    The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
    The difference between things and events is that
    things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones…
    The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.
    This has, for me, a somewhat astounding implication: I am not an entity. I am a string of events, distributed across spacetime, separated from one another by Planck time and Planck distance. The only thing that connects me with the person who wrote this newsletter in March is the fact that I remember writing this newsletter in March; the experience of doing so made a footprint in my memory, and that footprint’s outline is still visible.

43 minutes of me making a kickstand

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This summer I spent a bunch of time working on my bike. I’ve been riding it almost every day for about two years now, and it needed both aesthetic and functional upgrades - from its powder coat job to its lighting system to the bike seat I built for my daughters to ride in. It also needed a new kickstand, the design of which is rather specialized and unique.

The kickstand ended up being an involved process: its main component is a CNC’d aluminum block, into which two stainless steel legs are secured. It was the first custom CNC’d component I’ve bought in a few years, and also the first TIG welding I’ve done in a while, and in the end it represented a huge upgrade to the functionality of the bike.

Anyway. Here’s me, building a new kickstand, for your viewing pleasure :)

Why is This Interesting - the maritime right of way edition

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Recently I had the chance to guest write Why Is this Interesting, an excellent newsletter on Substack. I wrote about maritime right of way and how I think it can (and should) be adapted for our streets; a slightly reformatted version appears below.


When humans choose to live by sea, they do so in a largely self-regulated way. Admiralty law does, of course, cover the big stuff: injury, theft, and certain types of contract disputes. But the vast majority of what people do in the water is travel, and traveling by water is a decidedly laissez-faire enterprise.

The international rules of the maritime “road” were set in 1972 in the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, commonly referred to as 72 COLREGS. The full rules are 226 pages, but the vast majority are distilled down into the US Coast Guard’s Amalgamated International & U.S. Inland Rules—a 35 page document. It’s incredibly straightforward stuff. Take, for example, Rule 18, which covers right of way between boats:

(a) A power-driven vessel underway shall keep out of the way of:

  • (i) a vessel not under command;

  • (ii) a vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver;

  • (iii) a vessel engaged in fishing;

  • (iv) a sailing vessel.

(b) A sailing vessel underway shall keep out of the way of:

  • (i) a vessel not under command;

  • (ii) a vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver;

  • (iii) a vessel engaged in fishing.

(c) A vessel engaged in fishing when underway shall, so far as possible, keep out of the way of:

  • (i) a vessel not under command;

  • (ii) a vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver.

Boats have a lot to worry about, but a complicated set of right-of-way laws is not one of them. If you’re in a motorboat, you need to stay away from sailboats, fishing boats, disabled boats, and “vessels not under command”—basically, anyone that’ll have a hard time staying away from you. The rules for sailboats are similarly simple: just knock “a sailing vessel” off the list above and you’re good to go. Ditto for fishing boats, who only need to remember to avoid unmanned boats (makes sense) and boats that are clearly having a hard time moving around (ditto).

Why is this interesting?

Life at sea is too complex to be bogged down in minutiae. In order to survive there, humans have created logical frameworks for behavior—ones which usually fall back to something like “stay away from boats that look like they might have a hard time staying away from you.” They are expressions of ethics and common sense: it would be wrong for a motorboat to run over a canoe, and it would be wrong for a pleasure yacht to play chicken with an oil tanker. Rule 18 reflects that.

Of course, life in and around automobiles is too complex to be bogged down in minutiae too. Cars are shockingly dangerous, and their impact is both dramatic (car crashes have been by far the leading cause of death for children since at least 1990) and diffuse (roads make up 27% of NYC’s land mass—roughly 52,000 acres, which at $5M per acre makes the land they’re built on worth over $260B). 

And yet we do a terrible job encoding our ethics into our traffic laws. 

New York State’s vehicle code defines right of way in Article 26, which drawls on for 2500 words and takes care to mention that drivers should “give warning by sounding the horn when necessary” while passing “domesticated sheep, cattle, and goats”—while separately specifying that they *shouldn’t* blow their horns when approaching horses (what this has to do with right of way, I don’t know). Article 26 does direct drivers to “exercise due care” not to hit cyclists and pedestrians, but the vehicle code provides scant guidance on how, other than not killing them, drivers should interact with light vehicles and unprotected people on the street. 

The picture becomes notably worse when you view the New York State vehicle code for what it is: just one part of a patchwork of overlapping instructions. If you live in the US and drive to work, it’s likely that you pass through multiple jurisdictions—each with their own legal carve-outs and enforcement regimes. The result is often a sense of uncertainty for everyone—does the car with Maryland plates know it can’t turn right on red in Manhattan? All of this is compounded by the fact that, ultimately, nobody follows every law while moving through the streets, and so everyone can reasonably (at least in their minds) claim moral superiority when they’re inconveniencing someone else. This leaves the streets less safe and everyone less happy.

Aside from the microstates of San Marino and Monaco, the US has more motor vehicles per capita than any other country in the world. Even New York City, which is in many ways the most bike/ped friendly place in the country, there are regularly dozens of cyclists and hundreds of pedestrians killed by cars every year. And yet, we have failed  to define a coherent, unified perspective on how different modes of transportation (including feet) should relate to one another.

Our roads are where life happens. We spend almost ten percent of our waking hours on the road; we interact with police on the road more than anywhere else; we’re injured and killed on the road at alarming rates. And yet our ethical approach to life (and death) on the road is complex and internecine. Perhaps if we want our streets to be more ethical, we should do a better job of encoding our ethics into the rules that govern them.

Walker-Turner

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Late last summer I took on what at the time seemed like a reasonable project: Restoring an old (1940s) Walker-Turner 15” drill press. I had acquired it for an attractive price (free) but it had a number of issues, including:

  • A pretty bad repaint job, on top of a pretty old original paint job, resulting in paint chips everywhere

  • A missing belt guard, which I was able to replace with an unpainted (and cracked) belt guard

  • A step pulley drive system, which made for laborious speed changes & general annoyance

  • …and 80 years of general wear & tear

Nevertheless, it was a functional drill press and that’s infinitely better than no drill press at all. I got to work.

Few things are less fun than stripping paint, and this project had lots of paint to strip - from irregular and rough (cast iron) surfaces, no less. Much time was spent on this: First with scrapers, then with sandpaper, then with (ew) paint remover, Simple Green, and *lots* of time with stainless steel brushes. It was, to be honest, exhausting, and were it not for the fact that I had already announced the project on Instagram it may have destroyed my resolve. Perhaps the lowest moment was when I wheeled a bunch of these parts - a load weighing probably 150 lbs - to a friend’s shop a few blocks away to use his sandblaster. I spent a few hours there hunched over listening to podcasts, and then left with less than half of the parts in a paintable state.

Defeated, I turned to aircraft paint remover - a deeply disappointing surrender, and one with its own set of challenges. Paint remover is no more foolproof - and much more toxic - than mechanical means of removing paint. I used it years ago once, and did not enjoy the experience.

There was one satisfying interlude here, which was cleaning (with a degreaser and then a wire wheel) all of the non-painted parts in the drill press.

For most of the parts, prep continued with two additional steps. First, everything got a light coat of PickleX, a conversion coating. Second, everything was dried out really well using some hacky methods: A hot plate and a heat gun.

File_029.jpeg

The drill press’s head got one additional step: Bondo, which was rather satisfying to use but didn’t contribute all that much to the final product.

After probably a week’s worth of work (spread out over a month or so), I finally got a brush out. The primer I was using was horrid, a product that was reduced with methyl amyl ketone and was both thin and extremely fast drying. It went on like water, until it turned to a weird slurry just a few minutes later - a rather unnerving transition.

Finally, the drill press was ready to go back together. At this point I had begun to seriously question whether this project would produce results commensurate with my efforts; the 900 series is after all a relatively small drill press, and I had a growing feeling that it might have made more sense to restore a more capable machine. Regardless, it was satisfying to finally see something more or less functional:

At this point there was one remaining issue: The belt cover. The part, which I bought on eBay, had a crack in it that I wanted to repair and reinforce. I drilled a hole at the end of the crack, cut a piece of low carbon steel to fit on the inside, drilled through the belt cover and tapped the reinforcing plate, and epoxied and screwed the whole thing in place. I then used bondo to smooth everything over, and primed + painted like the rest of the drill press.

And voila: A working, 80-year-old drill press, painted baby blue and equipped with more or less modern fittings. The result was emotionally restorative, and I’ve got a few key takeaways:

  • Paint is never the color you think. It may be pretty, but it’s not what you thought it would be.

  • It really is amazing when replacement parts are easily available 80 years later.

  • If you can avoid repainting something, you should. A new paint job won’t turn out that nice, and it’ll take you forever to finish.

  • This Walker-Turner isn’t the drill press I might have wished my life on, but it’s way more of a drill press than no drill press at all. In other words: It’s pretty nice to have it working.

File_013(1).jpeg

Everything is ready

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From the whiteboard that I sat immediately in front of back in like 2012:

everything is ready-1.jpg

At the time I was designing & managing production of robot doors, and the goal of this note was to get the entire shop (a multi-use space for design, prototyping, and production) clean and orderly every day. We all agreed that it was okay, on occasion, to leave parts & tools out overnight. But when our workday began at 7:00, everyone was committed to cleaning and organizing for up to 45 minutes - so that every single morning, the whole shop was reset back to a neat and orderly condition.

I found this habit to be totally fruitful, but I’ll admit that since I left that job I haven’t really found a way to replicate it. Today (especially under quarantine) my work is largely digital, and aside from making an attempt to clear out my inbox every morning (a Sisyphean task that I find less satisfying than sweeping the floor) it’s not totally clear what in my work life needs to be reset every day.

Regardless, the physical practice of cleaning up is something I aspire to. If anyone out there has developed a digital analog I’d love to hear it.

Three things you should know before starting a Patreon page

Added on by Spencer Wright.

For the three years starting in April of 2017, I ran much of The Prepared’s (and ultimately my family’s) income through Patreon. I started doing so as an experiment - one that by any measure has been a success. But while Patreon was instrumental in that process, I recommend that creators not structure their incomes and careers around Patreon. Here’s why.

Patreon’s creator analytics are opaque and unpredictable

Like many creators, I chose Patreon’s “pay by the creation” (rather than “pay by the month) mode. This directly incentivizes creators to continue doing the actual work, and keeps them accountable to the commitments they make.

But what Patreon doesn’t tell you is that fans can optionally set a monthly cap on their spending, and that cap can be arbitrarily low - even less than your per-creation commitment level. In other words, a reader of my weekly newsletter could pledge $5 per newsletter, but then set a $2 monthly cap. The worst part about this is that there’s literally nowhere in the Patreon backend that I can see this cap. I spoke to Patreon’s product team about this in late 2018, and they told me that the best thing I could do is to look at my creation-by-creation analytics at the end of the month and see which of my patrons paid for which creations; if a person doesn’t show up at the end of the month, then they must have set a cap.

This is a totally unscalable solution, and it makes the process of issuing patron rewards excruciatingly hard to manage. Creators need the ability to quickly and easily determine who is paying them for what; Patreon makes this impractically hard.

Further:

Declined pledges were a big problem on my account, and Patreon makes it unnecessarily hard to figure out whose charges are declined.

These numbers do not represent earnings.

  • Patreon provides email alerts for when a new patron makes a pledge, but has no email or push notifications for when patrons delete pledges.

  • Patreon has no creator-side notification system for declined charges or charges that are flagged for fraud. Worse yet, their patron-side notification system appears to be totally ineffective; many long time patrons (and personal friends of mine) were genuinely shocked to hear, many months later, that their monthly charges had been declined - leading to their pledges being automatically canceled by Patreon. Even worse, Patreon’s “Declines” page, which shows the total declined amount on a month by month basis, has no way of showing which patrons’ pledges were declined - you instead need to go into the “Relationship Manager” and filter by “Declined” to see whose charges have gone through, and when.

  • If you, as a creator, go through all of the effort to find charges that have been declined or marked as fraud, it can then be really difficult to recoup that revenue. This is mostly a result of the fact that most Patreon creators charge a small amount of money (a couple dollars) per month. In theory you could email or message the patron when their charge doesn’t go through, but in practice it feels a bit weird to be hounding someone over (say) $4. If the pledge was billed on an annual basis, though, it might be a big enough sum to warrant the effort.

  • Patreon uses accounting terms with little regard for their generally accepted meaning. See the screenshot above, which is titled “Earnings Projections” but then actually lists gross revenue. In accounting, earnings is the same as profit - it’s what a company has left after every expense is paid, whereas gross revenue is the total amount that a company takes in and doesn’t take into account expenses at all. In other words, Patreon is suggesting that the numbers here are what will be deposited into my bank account - but once Patreon takes their platform fees, it’ll actually be significantly less. This kind of sloppy terminology is all over Patreon’s creator backend, and no matter how you slice it is either the result of gross incompetence or a deliberate desire to deceive creators.

Patreon’s fee structure makes no sense

Between credit card processing fees (2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction) and Patreon’s cut (between 5% and a whopping 12%), your earnings will be significantly less than your top line pledged amount. In practice, I saw total fees of between 8-12%. (Note: I signed up for Patreon before they shifted to tiered pricing, and now have a “Founder” Pro plan at a 5% platform fee rate. If you signed up for a Pro or Premium account today, you’d pay Patreon 3% or 7% more than I do, respectively.)

If Patreon were actively bringing customers to me - if normal people were just out there browsing Patreon for awesome things to support - then that might make sense. But the reality is that success on Patreon is inextricably tied to having your own platform and community. All Patreon does is manage recurring payment processing - a commodity service that many companies do for a drastically lower fee structure. Sure, ostensibly you can also be having conversations with patrons, generating some kind of community there, etc - but every step you take to encourage users to interact with you on Patreon, the more you undermine your own platform. In other words, Patreon engages in rent seeking - but they ultimately do it on your platform, and don’t bring a built-in audience with which to raise you higher.

When I transitioned off of Patreon, I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature. The result is that my processing fees dropped dramatically. At my peak Patreon earnings, I was spending almost $300/month ($3600/year) on Patreon’s platform fees. My current revenue is roughly 3x what it was then, but I’m paying 68% less than I used to be. My current payments, web hosting, and accounting software outlay is $1,125 a year; if I had remained on Patreon my annual fees would be about $10,000.

Patreon integrates with basically nothing

Okay, you’re saying - so Patreon isn’t the perfect all-in-one platform that will allow me to bill, chat with, and build my audience. But maybe it’s a piece of a larger puzzle?

It’s a great idea, but unfortunately Patreon does a terrible job integrating with the other services that I use to run my business.

The first thing I’d want from Patreon is an easy way to automatically share my content (which most creators distribute elsewhere - for me, it’s Mailchimp) to Patreon. But while Patreon does have a public API, it’s poorly developed (there is no sandbox/testing area, and the most recent updates to their API libraries are from January of 2019) and only allows browsing/looking up data on Patreon; you cannot post content to your Patreon account via the API. This lack of functionality also exists in Zapier’s implementation of the Patreon API: You can use Patreon as a trigger, but not as an action.

What this means is that creators are inherently tied to Patreon’s terrible, horrible, clicky clicky GUI. You are completely tied to the limitations that are built into Patreon’s web product, and don’t have the ability to build automations that’ll speed up your content and customer management.

Patreon also fails to integrate well with accounting software - something that flies in the face of their promise to give creators “the stability you need to build an independent creative career.” Their API (and Zapier’s implementation of it) only provides pledge activity, and is therefore inaccurate (caps, declines, and fraud aren’t factored in - it’s a guesstimate at what you might make in the future) in all of the ways described above.

What Patreon is good for

I really can’t stress this enough: If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better options out there than Patreon. What Patreon does offer is a quick way to see whether people on the internet will pay you a little money for something that you’re already doing for free.

This is a nontrivial thing, but it’s something that you should really think through before you start a Patreon page. If it’s a success, then it’ll likely make a lot of sense for you to transition off of Patreon at some point in the foreseeable future. That might be fine - especially if you’re really early on and success feels like a longshot - but The Prepared’s transition off of Patreon required a lot of management on my part and resulted in roughly 1/3 of my patrons dropping their pledges.

To be clear: I’m deeply appreciative of all of the people and companies who supported me through Patreon, and it really is true that those first couple of dollars made a big impact in the path of my career. But Patreon as a platform did remarkably little to support me along that journey, even after I became a moderately successful creator and took quite a bit of time to explain my frustrations to both their customer service & user research teams.

What I'm working on

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Apropos of keeping myself accountable, here are a few things that are on my plate and in my mind at the moment:

  • Doing a good job writing The Prepared’s newsletter. I’m on the hook for personally writing about half of the newsletter’s issues this year, and I want to take advantage of that as much as possible.

  • Doing a good job managing guest editors for the newsletter. The newsletter has historically been a solo project, and I’m intensely aware that the onus is on me to communicate a standard of quality to everyone now involved in it - a task that I know I’m doing an imperfect job at.

  • Refining the public-facing definition of The Prepared’s Paid Subscriptions, and finding more effective (and non-sleazy) ways of getting more people to join the program. Paid subscribers provide me more psychological payoff than anything else I do professionally, and the program is also a significant portion of The Prepared’s business model. However, I haven’t done a particularly good job at communicating what the purpose of the program is or why readers would want to join it - something I definitely need to change.

  • Writing elsewhere. I’ve started and abandoned multiple posts here this year, and generally have not done a good job finding topics and outlets on which I can maximize my impact per word written. Part of this is understandable - it’s good that the newsletter is my primary focus - but it would be good for me to get more reps writing in longer form and for more varied audiences.

  • Affiliations. I’ve built myself a good little kingdom, but it would be good for me to find ways to involve myself with larger institutions. This is vague, but feels like it’ll be increasingly important and self-affirming in the coming phases of my career.

  • I really need to find ways to get more exercise. In 2011, I kind of flipped a switch on my health and, over the course of a year, lost about 50 lbs. But it required a ton of mental energy and a huge amount of time out of my week - something that, as a self employed person with a family, feels a little out of reach today. I need to find some kind of middle ground here, especially as I age and my kids become more physical.

  • Other projects. I like writing for a living, but it works best when I’m also doing other random shit - building a table, writing a little software, refurbishing a machine, editing someone else’s original research. These kinds of things have been particularly hard to take on during the shutdown, and moving forward it’s probably a good idea for me to schedule them out in a more rigorous way - perhaps at a rate of one project a quarter, or similar.

  • Prepare myself for something bigger and more meaningful. I want to find a measurable positive impact that I can make on the world and my community, ideally related to sustainability and/or economic development. And while I’m crazy proud of how The Prepared has grown to be a voice for good stuff, it mostly lacks the direct action that I’d like to have in my life.

Also: Being a good partner to Ada; showing my kids how interesting the world is and preparing them for being a part of it; being a better neighbor; finding ways to make my neighborhood more bike and pedestrian friendly; etc.

Working from afar

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Hey everyone. I hope you’re doing well. TL;DR, if you’re *not* doing well as a result of COVID-19, and if I (or The Prepared) could help, please be in touch.

I’ve been working from home for the past week and a half, and it has been a real emotional rollercoaster. I’ve spent a decent amount of my time trying to help out with medical supply sourcing for NYC - Tyvek suits, respirators, ventilators. The shitty thing to say about it is that it’s totally fun. I genuinely enjoy figuring out how you’d set up a new manufacturing line for a weird product, and right now pretty much everyone I’ve called (side note: using a telephone is great) has been more than willing to help me learn.

The other important factor, of course, is that I’m just *so* lucky that I can seamlessly move the large majority of my work to a makeshift home office, which then gives me time to bake bread every morning and also the freedom to take half hour breaks to hunt through the kitchen with Nora to figure out what dissolves in water and what doesn’t, or to step into the backyard with Tess to let her poke around in the dirt. Note also that by any measure, Ada has taken on a much larger burden than I have, providing us all much needed stability and joy.

But the rollercoaster part mostly has to do with the place I’m at in my career, and the degree to which I’m both in an ideal position to help the response effort and also feel woefully unqualified to take it on. I am presumably not alone on this - at least the latter part.

I think there’s another weird factor here, and it’s the combination of the feeling that this is a generation-defining event and also the sense that it’s all being hashed out on Twitter and Slack and Reddit. All of my reference points (wartime production during WWII, The New Deal, the Apollo program) for existential collective struggles involve a lot of top-down coordination, and it’s hard for me to imagine a path forward on this disaster that is fundamentally reliant on individual people 3D printing plastic bits and hand delivering them to intensive care units. It’s possible that my impression of wartime and wartime-adjacent efforts is naive, and that under the surface they’ve all been chaotic and ad hoc. It’s also distinctly possible that the hierarchical structures present in 20th century industrial America are actually counterproductive. But the current crisis still feels confusing.

Anyway. If you’re in need of help related to COVID-19 and I or The Prepared can provide it, please let me know. And wash your hands.

To be able to walk barefoot through the fields of the mind

Added on by Spencer Wright.

From an old recorded celebration of MIT Building 20:

One of the problems you see in modern research is whether you can persuade the authorities (at NIH, NSF, and so forth) to let you take a chance. Sometimes it's very difficult to defend chances. That freedom to be able to walk barefoot through the fields of the mind... that was something that was so central to Building 20 at the time... it was astonishing. There is a curious aspect about buildings where there has been dedicated work. You might almost say that it's far better than a monastery; it's more like a temple, where there's been dedicated work and where the scars and the marks on the walls and so forth all have meaning. All of the artifacts that are left aside somehow or another have meaning. There is, as it were, a passing on, not of the tradition, but of a vague memory that somehow or another is very rich.

- Jerry Lettvin, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering

Recent lessons, pt. 3

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I’m recently off of my second paternity leave, and again have spent some time reflecting. So, like parts 1 and 2, a few (more or less random) thoughts:

  • As one-off projects - discrete things that require planning, management, and execution - nothing beats cooking a good meal.

  • As one-off engineered objects - things that require design, fabrication, and systems integration - nothing beats a bicycle.

  • Writing software brings with it both a strong sense of opportunity and also a creeping feeling that the whole thing very well might be fake.

  • Empires can be built through persistence - through late nights, doggedly following every lead, and waiting around long enough to catch a little luck. But finding your crew - without which your empire might not be worth it - requires patience, empathy, and *incredibly* good timing, and in some ways these are things that empire-building seems to breed out of people.

Wanting people to see it

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Recently a reader wrote in asking for advice about gaining an audience for their work. This is something that I’ve had some modest success at, but also something that I feel conflicted about; my reply, below, felt worth sharing.

If you want to get attention, tackle a subject that other people want to learn about. This is hard to do, hard to judge, and kind of obvious to point out - but it's critical if you want to reach a large audience. Bin of broken dreams (the piece that, despite being outdated and outwritten by many subsequent years of work, is still this site’s most-trafficked blog post month after month) was successful largely because I was debunking an idea that a lot of people were either invested in or curious about. “Just press print” was a popular concept, and the story I presented in that piece directly countered it. That was lucky, but there are a LOT of other ideas floating around that would warrant a similar approach.

I should caution you, however: If you prove yourself a good communicator - and worse, if you build yourself an audience - then you may find yourself increasingly boxed into marketing either your own or other people’s stuff.

That may be fine; I value communication, and enjoy promoting both my own work and good shit around me. But it’s also limiting. On almost a daily basis, someone writes me to ask for either an introduction or help promoting their thing. But my (apparent) skills in writing, and in building a community around myself, have largely overshadowed any of my more technical or managerial traits.

I started blogging in early 2013, and I started The Prepared late the same year. I would do it all again, but I recommend that you consider what you want your day-to-day work to look like - and remember that fame (however modest) mostly breeds a continued pressure towards fame.

Swag

Added on by Spencer Wright.

To my surprise as much as anyone else’s, the little manufacturing newsletter that I started five years ago has swag now:

pencils-1.jpg

Thanks to everyone who’s read this site - and The Prepared - as it has grown into an actual thing. Now head on over to The Prepared’s Subscriptions page to get on the distribution list :)

Why it's sixty dollars

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Note: If you’re reading this in the 2018 holiday season, use code “WHYITS60” to get The Public Radio for its mid-2017 price of $39. Happy holidays :)


Recently The Public Radio, the FM radio that I co-created, rather unceremoniously instituted a 33% retail price hike. It was a tough decision to make, and one that felt both like a capitulation and an experiment. It came about four and a half years after we first launched the product, and about a year after we relaunched it with the intention of building a sustainable, US-based supply chain. In other words, it was pretty late in the product’s life cycle to be making such a drastic change - something I thought a lot about.

For those who haven’t fully thought through what it would mean to manufacture consumer electronics in the US - and for those who’ve idly contended that we live in an age of mass customization - I offer my experiences.

How our supply chain works

Like all consumer electronics, many of the components (microprocessors, passives, electro-mechanical components) in The Public Radio are either only made in China or simply not practical to purchase from the US. For instance, the FM receiver module we use is marketed by a US company (Silicon Labs) but made in China, and even the worlds largest electronics brands would have little power to change that. Similarly our speaker could theoretically be made in the US, but to do so would effectively kill our cost structure, probably moving the radio’s retail price well above $100 from an already expensive $60.

As a result, there are only a handful of physical components which we source from the US: The mason jar that the radio is housed in (purchased from Newell Brands, which has a license on the iconic Ball jar product line) and our custom cardboard box, which is only cost effective when purchased within ~100 miles of where the radio’s final assembly occurs. We’ve seriously considered changing jars to a Chinese made version, which would probably result in a 50% price cut on that component, but the scale of our production didn’t warrant it. And besides, being able to order a few thousand jars at a time is quite appealing in contrast to the 10-20,000 unit orders that an overseas supplier would require.

Our assembly labor, however, is in the US and accounts for roughly half of our cost of goods sold. Our excellent assembly partner (Worthington Assembly) produces printed circuit board assemblies in batches of 324 (36 panels of 9 PCBs each; this number ends up working nicely with the trays we store the radios in). They then use those PCBAs, plus three mechanical components which we supply them with, to create mechanical assemblies which sit in inventory until a customer places an order. At that point a mechanical assembly is taken off of a shelf and programmed to the FM frequency the customer requested. It undergoes a full functional test and is put in the mail - typically less than a day after an order is placed. See this blog post for a more detailed description.

In other words: We’re making a piece of consumer electronics just-in-time in the US.

I can’t stress how unusual this is; it’s simply not how things are done. Most consumer electronics rely intensely on the supply chains of the Pearl River Delta - the same places where our speaker, battery clips, knob, and potentiometer (and likely a number of other tertiary components) are made. They’re made in batches between 10,000 and a million, and are then containerized and shipped to large fulfillment centers in places like Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and Chino, CA. There they sit, sealed in their retail packaging until someone places an order. And when that happens, a relatively low-skilled worker picks it off a shelf and puts it in a box.

As appealing as this may sound, it isn’t a realistic option for The Public Radio. TPR is customized to one of about 300 possible FM frequencies, and unless we were willing to purchase a huge stock of pre-programmed radios (with more of the popular frequencies, just like T-shirt makers buy more medium and large sizes than XXXL) it just wasn’t practical to assemble it in China. A few proposals that we considered:

  1. Assemble un-programmed radios in China, put them in boxes, and ship them to the US; then use a contactless programming method to program the FM frequency at a US fulfillment center. This isn’t crazy, and Josh created a pretty impressive technical demonstration. But finding a fulfillment partner was problematic, and switching to this process would effectively prohibit us from doing the laser marking that our radio station customers love so much.

  2. Do partial assembly in China (mechanical assemblies only - no jars or boxes) and do the rest in the US. Similar to #1, finding a fulfillment house was an issue - and the laser marking would have been tricky as well. Additionally, we’d be stuck using expensive US-made mason jars, keeping our COGS high while requiring a bunch of additional work on our part.

  3. Just add a tuning knob, turning the product from “a single channel radio in a mason jar” to “a mason jar radio.” This is a fair suggestion, but one that (for philosophical reasons) didn’t make sense for us.

In summary, The Public Radio is a relatively rare example of a consumer electronics product whose supply chain relies heavily on the greater Shenzhen ecosystem but then is assembled and fulfilled completely from the US. We’re proud of this fact, but have been pragmatic (as opposed to idealistic) about how our supply chain operates. So with that in mind: How exactly does The Public Radio end up as a $60 product?

Where the money goes

So, here are the big takeaways:

  • Our cost of goods sold has varied a little over the past year, but it’s currently around $18.54.

  • 75% of our cost of goods sold goes to US vendors, and the majority of that stays in the US.

  • About 50% of our cost of goods sold goes towards assembly labor. Part of this is automated (pick and place PCBA) but more than half is hand assembly.

  • The two most expensive components in our BOM are:

    • Our speaker, at $2.35/ea, accounts for 12.68% of our COGS. This is manufactured in Dongguan (see here for photos of the facility) and is custom for us.

    • Our FM receiver module, at $1.53/ea, accounts for 8.26% of our COGS. This is a standard component from Silicon Labs, and I’m told that its claim to fame is that it was part of the original iPod Nano. This is probably the first component on our list to replace, as there are certainly less expensive chips options with all the options we’d need.

The broader story is that at our scale (5-10,000 units per year), consumer electronics is expensive. Purchases at that level simply don’t bring much leverage, and our just-in-time production model ends up being expensive on a per-minute basis (partly due to switching costs).

Here are the raw(er) numbers:

COGS by vendor location

How you sell a product with an $18 COGS

Back in 2014, we sold our first few units for $45 direct to consumers. Our first Kickstarter sold radios for $48/ea with shipping (about $5 our cost) included. In our second Kickstarter, we dropped the price to $39/ea and then charged shipping separately.

In mid 2017 we got our first retail account and listed The Public Radio for $45/ea. We set up drop shipping terms with a wholesale price of $33.75, a price that was intended to give equal margins to us and our retailers.

Sadly for us, this arrangement failed to gain traction. We got about as many 2017 holiday orders as we had hoped for (and about as many as we could have handled; see here for more history, including the ~1000 radios that I personally assembled and shipped from my basement on nights & weekends), but per the section above it became evident that we would need to increase our volumes significantly to make the numbers work out at a $45 price point. And while we maintain 4.9 star reviews on Uncommon Goods, the process of signing up large drop-ship accounts is simply a new skill, and one that hasn’t so far aligned well with our operating model.

So, we increased our prices. On the one hand this sounds crazy - we had a relatively successful product that we wanted to sell more of; the typical answer to that scenario is probably not to charge more for it. But the price increase allowed us to offer keystone pricing to brick-and-mortar retailers, and it gave drop-ship retailers significantly more margin to play with - making us a better partner for them as well.

In the meantime, we doubled down on direct-to-consumer sales. This also is a new skill, but I’m happy to say that since our price increase, we’ve managed to more than double both our direct-to-consumer revenue and our direct-to-consumer sales volume; in other words, we’re selling more units and making more money off of each sale.

Looking ahead

Every time I look back at The Public Radio, I marvel at just how much work has gone into it. It now runs as a well oiled machine; we’ve invested heavily in order processing & inventory management automation, and have structured our vendor & customer relationships in ways that allow us to produce a piece of consumer electronics as a side job. And in spite of (or perhaps because of) a fair dose of uncertainty early in 2018, it’s now clear that this will be a profitable year for us.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done, and I continue to wonder whether there are fundamental changes we could make to allow our US based supply chain to thrive even more. I’m lucky to have been able to explore this kind of manufacturing as much as I have thus far; I look forward to more of it in the next year.