This week, we visit HYX Gears and ITEAD Studios.

In the last two factory tours of our visit to Shenzhen, we learn about the many varied and wide ranging sizes of gears manufactured by HYX. Although our tour was quick, we walked through several facilities of theirs, which featured handmade metal gears, plastic injection moulded gears and metal gears created on CNC hobbing machines. For Brian Gilbert, it was an opportunity to visit his manufacturer of gears, for his product “the Zesy Nimble” 3D Printer extruder – https://zesty.tech

ITEAD Studios makes the Sonoff range of home automation devices which many hackers and makers like Jon Oxer take advantage of (thanks to the onboard ESP8266 chipset) to automate their houses. Jon has made an excellent video about the same factory tour, which you can see here: https://www.superhouse.tv/27-visit-to… as well as featured Sonoff products in his Youtube series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_389p…

ITEAD have found the balance between quality and volume production by designing their products for a largely manual, simple manufacturing process. We walk through the lines and witness the rows of human hands on the production line.

As a group we discuss the tradeoff between quality and rapid low cost manufacturing. Both have their place and our many factory tours give us plenty to think about in terms of our needs. In some cases, quality is everything (such as defense, medical, health and safety etc) while in other cases, cost is everything. Determining your “buy in” to this dilemma is a very important step in understanding your requirements. You can buy any amount of quality and this is up to you, the commissioning designer/entrepreneur!

For more about HYG Gears visit http://www.hyx-gears.com
For more about ITEAD Studios visit https://www.itead.cc