From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum welcome Alex Fitzgerald, founder of Isembard - a micro-factory startup that's building Britain's manufacturing future one CNC machine at a time.
Alex explains how Britain's manufacturing crisis isn't just about big factories closing - it's about the hidden supply chain of small family-owned machine shops that actually make the parts for everything from F-35 jets to AirPods. With 95% of CNC machines owned by small businesses, and those business owners now retiring en masse, the West faces a manufacturing capacity cliff just as geopolitical tensions increase demand.
“Fundamentally, how you build great product is having engineers ingest pain and then output product.”
The episode explores:
Whether distributed manufacturing is more resilient than centralized factories
How Britain's hidden aerospace and defense supply chains actually work
Why small machine shops are the real manufacturing base, not big assembly plants
The role of risk capital in building trillion-dollar manufacturing businesses
How software and AI are transforming traditional machining and production
What young engineers can do to build world-changing manufacturing businesses
Further reading
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