omenti

repairability

My Dad was a Ford man.  More specifically the Ford Falcon.  It was a simple compact car with a 170 cubic inch displacement straight six coupled to a three speed manual transmission.  It scored on the high end of the Mobil fuel economy test - about 19 miles per gallon when the average sedan was in the 12 to 14 range.   But what he really liked about it was how repairable it was.  Not only was it simple to work on, but most of his friends had cars with the same engine and transmission.  If something needed fixing we could usually do it ourselves using tools borrowed from one of his friends.  For more serious repairs there were specialized tools from Strobel's A to Z Rental, garages or (shudder) the Ford dealer.

 

The simplicity of cars of the day was balanced by crude manufacturing tolerances.  Pistons fit so poorly in the cylinders that the first 500 or 1000 miles were done with great care using an abrasive oil to polish the parts into shape.  It made a big difference in gas mileage and extending the life of the engine past 50,000 miles.  

 

The dual gas shocks of the 70s opened the market for better cars that used higher precision design and manufacturing processes.  That and the beginnings of cars that crumpled to absorb energy in crashes made simple repair much more difficult.  The amateur mechanic had largely vanished by the 80s.

 

Clothing and shoes were expensive back then.  Quality construction and repairability were important considerations while shopping.  Tailors and dress makers were common.  The same was true for appliances.  Vacuum cleaners, toasters and anything electronic could be repaired at home or the local repair shop. 

 

There are exceptions today .. Jheri makes her own clothing or buys high quality pieces with the intention of buying very little as she hopes each piece will last at least a decade.  She's abandoned fashion and has created a style very much her own.  I suspect some of you - Om for example - have a similar philosophy.    But while it can be done in clothing, it's next to impossible when electronics are involved.

 

By the time I was fourteen I had three or four black and white TVs.  None of them worked - watching TV wasn't interesting.  The tubes, capacitors, transformers, switches and so on..  now those were useful!  I designed and built a few radios and a stereo amplifier.   It was straightforward and the experience taught me a lot about electronics.  Now I look in a computer, TV or radio and see only massive integration.  It's still possible to build things, but design is much more difficult. Learning about circuit elements is probably better done with computer simulations.   

 

The right to repair movement has grown in recent years.  I welcome  it for some products, but given the tight integration of hardware and software  I worry it may not be as generally attractive as proponents claim.  

 

Smartphones are a case in point. Apple is infamous for discouraging third party repair.  You can order a kit from Ifixit to replace a screen, battery and some other parts.  It can work well if you have a bit of experience and Ifitit is upfront with the degree of difficultly. You lack the tools and technique to take apart, replace and reassemble the device to design specifications.  

 

My personal results are mixed.  I easily replaced the battery (twice!) on my first day, first generation iPod.  The battery and screen on my out of warranty iPhone 5 was a different matter.   After five hours of frustration I was left with an operating phone, but the case was fitting tightly and whatever waterproofness was gone.   The misaligned case also interfered with the physical buttons on the side.  I did get another year and a half from the phone though.   It could be worse.  I know someone who replaced the battery on an Android phone with an inexpensive battery from Amazon.  The phone got very hot during charging and caught on fire when he took it apart to pull the battery out.  It filled his place with acrid smoke, but fortunately only destroyed the phone and wastebasket

 

Apple is afraid of regulation so they offer repair kits for some of their devices.   The Verge documented a battery replacement.  You get a huge repair kit with a large hold on your credit card until Apple gets the kit back.  The process probably works well if you're skilled at working with small electronic devices, but this isn't for everyone. Given the cost of shipping I suspect Apple's losing money, but they're also trying to make a point of what it takes to do a high quality repair.  Of course a third party repair shop could buy the tools and perform quality repairs and I suspect that will happen.  Lower quality shops abound, but your phone or laptop may be a bit wonky afterwards.

 

We need to understand what's repairable, what's sort of repairable, and what's not.  Easy to repair smartphones have been offered but they're generally expensive and lacking in features.  I suspect smartphones, laptops and smartwatches are probably moving to a subscription model anyway.  Clothing and some appliances could made for longer lifetimes and repairability.  Then again convincing consumers and companies to move away from a consumption model is a huge, but very important, challenge. 

 

I've mentioned clothing, but should follow-up with other product areas where design for long life, repairability and upgrading is important. It's generally expensive, but in the long run can have advantages.  You may live in an example.

 

 

building blocks

Watching Apple's Mac Studio announcement yesterday took my mind to something Carl Sagan said in the Cosmos series.

The Mac Studio's underlying technology goes far beyond the many tens of thousands of person-hours Apple has invested.  The semiconductor industry that stands on the shoulders of Bell Laboratories back to the fundamental work of James Clerk Maxwell and before.  Apple and others are able to come up with advances that strike us as dramatic as they make an impact on our lives.  The impact of some innovations like the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, powered flight, radio, the atomic bomb and the Internet have changed how we see ourselves.   But take a look and they're all built on long chains of invention and innovation that are often forgotten.

 

This comes to mind with the horrors going on in Ukraine.  Russia has always had brilliant minds.  They've made stunning advances in physics and math, but they haven't been as successful as the West in building on that.  A good deal of their technology is derivative.  In the past 25 years this may be by design. Most of the export value comes from extraction - oil and other natural resources. These industries seem to fall under the direct control of Putin's friends.  More technical industries are still under oligarchs, but these aren't super high profit.  As long as the core players can control them, the real focus of the economy is what can be run by shear force and power rather than technology and sound business practices.  (note - this is speculation as I'm certainly not a Russian expert..  so take it with a grain of salt).  

 

High tech industry is required for the military and some consumer use.  Although that is supposed to be home-brew there is a lot of importing and rebranding. I've seen that in electronics used in physics experiments and am told is standard operating procedure.

 

So imagine you can't important and rebrand the CNC tools necessary to make jet engines.  Can you make the tools yourself. What if you can't even make precision bearings?  What if China doesn't allow electronics into the country (they probably will, but now they can be the Mafia dons)?  Sanctions can make a medium and longterm impact.  

 

You don't need to make your Apple pies from scratch - we have our universe - but few companies or countries have the capability to build objects of the modern world without technologies that exist outside.  All of these long threads few of us think about until they aren't available.  Think about all of those high value products waiting for fifty cent ICs that were designed twenty years ago...

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PS - I'd love a Mac Studio, but it's way beyond my budget. 

 

 

repairability

Growing up our family always had Fords.  For most of grade school through junior high that meant a blue Ford Falcon.  My Dad's reasoning was simple - a neighbor had good mechanical experience with Fords, particularly the straight-6 engine in the Falcon.  He also had a nice set of tools. Much of it was simple enough that I was involved in part of the routine maintenance even before I had my driver's license.  Simple things like changing the oil every 1,500 miles, gapping and replacing the spark plugs, making sure the battery levels were ok, draining the radiator, testing and replacing the antifreeze, and taking off the air cleaner to spray ether in when cold-starting it when it was below -20°F.   

 

By the time I was driving legally  (I drove a pickup on a wheat farm during harvest the year before I had my license. I suspect that was common in Montana.  Learning how to drive a manual transmission amounted to me trying to not stall the pickup while my boss watched laughing for an hour.)  By high school I graduated to more sophisticated work.  Replacing the head gasket on my own and even replacing the rings under the watchful eye of my Dad's friend.  Everything was exposed and simple - most of it was just sorting out fuel, air and spark.   Sometimes, driving to King's Hill on a hot Summer day, the engine would quit.  That meant pouring some cold water on the fuel line near the engine and waiting a few minutes to break the vapor lock.  Each car had a set of peculiar tricks, but makes had personalities.  Changing to a Chevy or Dodge would have a learning curve.

 

While the Falcon was simple and to work on, almost everything was poorly made.  Perhaps not to the eye, but tolerances in the engine and transmission were sloppy.  A careful break-in period was necessary if you wanted an engine and transmission to last.  It was inefficient even though it didn't weigh much by today's standards.  Although it was a compact, it only got 18 miles per gallon on the road and 13 or 14 in town.  Engine and transmission oil had to be replaced regularly.  Tires went about 10,000 miles if you were lucky, brakes needed adjustment every few thousand miles, the chassis needed lubrication regularly and so on.  The body and chassis designs were primitive and non-crashworthy by today's standards.  Cars often remained fairly intact even in fatal collisions.  

 

The seventies brought more efficient designs along with increasing safety regulation.  More sophisticated tooling that produced dramatically improved engine and transmission tolerances that allowed more efficient designs.   They lasted longer, but it was becoming difficult to work on them.   Repair was moving towards replace.  The failure of a wiring harness on the mechanism for an electric window might be a fifty cent part, but the replacement module could cost hundreds and require several hours of work to replace.

 

Home electronics followed a similar path.  Our first TV was a 19" black and white Magnavox from about 1961.  It had a few dozen tubes, a lot of point to point wiring and hand-soldering, and mechanical switches.  If something went wrong the first step was to take off the back of the set and see if any of the tubes weren't glowing.  You'd pull the suspect out and test it at the local drugstore - most had a tube testing kiosk with a stock of replacement tubes.  That happened a few times before we got our first color TV in 1969 - a Motorola "Quasar" which only had two tubes including the picture tube.  It's main selling point was reliability. By the 80s integrated circuits began to invade home electronics and home repairs became next to impossible.  It didn't matter as we perceived our devices were improving faster than their failure rate.  Prices dropped so rapidly that throwing them away became popular.

 

This replace rather than fix mindset applies to many consumer goods, and many aren't engineered for a long life.  During the pandemic our eight year old refrigerator failed.  I was able to get it working again in about a day, but the repair was anything but easy.  The dishwasher also failed.  A gear on the motor, but the replacement module was $260 and special tools are required. It was eight years old so the leap to a new unit was an easy choice.  I probably wouldn't have tried to repair these things if I didn't have the background of repairing things that broke at home.

 

Ten years ago a mechanical engineer friend thought there might be a market for simple good design and quality manufactured items - mostly home appliances.  They would cost more, but last twenty or thirty years and be easily repairable.   He built a few prototypes, but was laughed at.   It turns out we're mostly ok with disposable.

 

The design integration in most smartphones and watches makes repairs difficult.  If compact, rugged and waterproof are goals, replaceable batteries are an issue even though you may need to replace them every few years.  A cynic might say it gives the user a push to get a new device.  

 

More important is the level of software integration across the system.  Apple's walled garden is problematic for many, but the value of more security and privacy (assuming you don't live in China), and mostly well-behaved apps is worth it to many.  Trading price and flexibility for stability and privacy.   

 

This raises the question of what should we be using?  Cars are much safer and efficient, although more expensive to operate, consumer electronics are mostly better and much cheaper.  Thinking of different ways to do things probably makes sense.  Getting rid of a second car and adding an electric cargo bike if your roads are safe enough is an option.  Three very sophisticated friends have traded their smartphones for simple "dumb" phones.  Well-made and designed clothing that lasts a decade.  Not everyone has multiple choices, but the pandemic seems to have people questioning many things. 

 

I'll end with a recommendation that applies almost universally..  staying away from IoT (Internet of Things) devices makes a lot of sense unless you know exactly what the security and privacy issues are in each case.  And a fundamental flaw in many - they have software flaws and the only way to update is to throw them away and buy something new.  And while it's beyond the main message, some of these IoT devices send information back to organizations that market it.  They turn you and your behavior into a product.

 

 

your local replicator

minipost

I thought we were past the hype stage.  3d printing has been around for about three decades and has undergone a couple of "gee-whiz - this is the next PC .. the next Internet" hype stages.  Recently a friend mentioned a futurist was pushing it and a few other technologies as a way out of many of our problems.  It has it's place, but in the grand scheme of things it's still very much a niche player.  Once you get past prototyping or technically difficult shapes you run into the fact that it offers a limited palate of materials, is usually much more expensive than other techniques in volume and often comes with environmental and health issues. 

 

I've been playing with it as a hobbyist for about fifteen years.  I like making things and some shapes are too complex to use conventional tools.  It's fun to play with so give it a whirl if you like making.  Rather than buy a printer go with a service bureau.  Good printers are probably too expensive to justify and you don't want the noise and sometimes toxic fumes in your home. If you have some money to burn spend it on a computer controlled laser cutter or CNC milling machine...

 

The reasons why it's unlikely you'll be printing things at home rather than buying them in the next decade or three would fill a book.  Instead here's a book recommendation that will give you background and is one of those fun references almost no one has heard about.  Making It, Third Edition by Chris Lefteri.  It's aimed at designers who want to learn about manufacturing processes, but is highly readable detailed over 100 production processes at a high level.  It gives a sense of the importance of materials and dealing with scale and budget constraints.  

 

The practical openings hanging automated making are equally interesting.  Clothing is an area that could be huge.  I've written about it a few times and good progress is being made.  It also turns out to be interesting as it has great socio-economic issues.

 

Real innovation is rare.  A fun way to spend a day over the holidays is go to your library and go through Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines from the 50s and 60s.  These are excellent illustrations of technologies being hyped. You'll see a couple of things that worked out and hundreds that didn't.  At the same time they give a sense of how popular, and perhaps necessary, building skills were around the home then.

 

the mayor of allentown

You've probably seen this excellent summary of issues associated with the Boeing 737 Max.  The core message seems to be this:

They described a compartmentalized approach, each of them focusing on a small part of the plane. The process left them without a complete view of a critical and ultimately dangerous system." Few people get time to reflect and look at"inessential stuff" and few of those who can care to; they are used to be "focused."

Compartmentalization seems to be the default when it comes to complex systems.  I think it's ingrained in our culture to appreciate specific easily identifiable acts. "Catalysts" and generalists are rarely appreciated.  The move fast and break things mentality in certain quarters combined with interchangeable employees who fit certain descriptions is aspirational in certain quarters and it extends to education.

 

I'm reminded of an internal postmortem of an expensive disaster that occurred in AT&T's Allentown Western Electric facility in the early to mid 1980s.  Western Electric was AT&T's manufacturing arm. The telephone monopoly built a dizzying array of almost everything it used - from relays and wires to telephones and building sized switches.  Digital switches were built around computers and a specialized switching fabric  that required a lot of memory.  Manufacturing capabilities grew with the increasing need and AT&T, along with IBM, was inventing and developing a lot of core manufacturing technology as well as financing key pieces in Silicon Valley and beyond. By the early 80s these two companies were close to the leading edge of IC manufacture.  The Allentown works was Western Electrics cpu, memory and custom silicon location.

 

Western Electric and Bell Laboratories manufacturing and technical directors began to appear for the increasingly specialized subprocesses of a complex larger process.  They'd get together and meet regularly, but they each recognized they owned the most important part of the process. This focus and pride in specialization extended downwards.  In a sense they were sort of right - many of them were critically important.  They optimized their subprocesses measuring what they could find.

 

During the period a guy named Doug (I think) would wander around and talk to people.  Almost no one knew who he reported to, but he was friendly and smart.  Smart enough to let the engineers talk about what was going right and wrong. He'd take doughnuts around and show up at meetings and in the clean rooms.  No one considered him an expert, but the doughnuts were really good.  Every now and again he'd make suggestions being careful to let people feel it was really their idea.  He was given a somewhat derisive nickname - The Mayor of Allentown.

 

Doug worked for an old line director.  Someone who taught other companies how to make transistors in the early 1950s when AT&T, as a monopoly, was required to share their intellectual property.   The director created Doug's position as kind of generalist's glue.  Doug had a master's in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in anthropology. When the director retired the other directors absorbed his groups.  None of them saw any need for the Mayor. - his skillset wasn't specialized enough to give value to the company.  He was given an insulting offer and quit instead.

 

In a few months a series of process disasters cascaded through the works.  Critical switch and computer components weren't available to the people who needed them.  Other parts of the company had to do frantic redesigns to incorporate external parts.  Losses were well over $40 million in early 1980 dollars.  It took six months and an enormous revamp to get back on track.  Western Electric never regained its position as a leading edge manufacturer. 

 

It turns out you can still find excellent doughnuts in Allentown.

 

 

what if manufactured clothing fit everyone? what could possibly go wrong?

It was the dawn of the jet age the US Air Force had a serious problem.  Early jets were suddenly complex and flying them was more demanding.  There were a lot of crashes - a few days saw a dozen planes go down.  Sorting through crash reports pilot error was the big problem.  The question was what were the root causes?  

 

Attention turned to training, mechanical issues, checklists and cockpit design.  In the later there are issues of control type and layout and also the pilot.  At the time military pilots ranged from about five foot four inches to  six foot two.  To get to the bottom of things Lt. Gilbert Daniels, fresh out of physical anthropology from Harvard, measured nearly 150 dimensions of over 4,000 pilots.  The hope was to find and characterize averages or ranges of averages that could be used by cockpit and control designers. 

 

He picked ten of the most relevant measures..  leg length, reach and so on and narrowed things down to an average range of heights from five-seven to five-eleven.  Then all of the pilots were compared to the averages of the ten relevant measures.  The expected result would be a subset that would be within one standard deviation on all ten. The answer was zero - there was no average pilot out of a sample of 4,000.  

 

People who are looking for clothes that fit well are familiar with the problem average sizes.  They were good enough measures to allow mass produced clothes to take off and prices fall to the point where clothing could become a statement of style for average people.   It produces a lot a waste and lowered expectations of fit quality and access to design that might fit a personal style.  Clothing can be tailored, but most people put up with lower quality in return for very low prices and the opportunity to always buy something new. Some groups are at a built in disadvantage - plus sizes are too difficult to deliver to size using current production and sizing techniques.  And there are some groups who are out of normal size ranges who have to pay dearly for custom clothing if they want to express a personal style.    There are many problems and a good deal of opportunity for change in an industry that does about $1.5 trillion a year.

 

A few years ago I supported a Planet Money Kickstarter that funded reporting on the making of a simple t-shirt from planting the seeds to taking delivery.  The result was a fascinating serious that made two points.  The standardized shipping container has had an enormous impact on the world's economy since about 1980.  I'd put it's impact up there with computerization, although it has certainly used a lot of that technology.  The other point is that apparel manufacture is complex with most of the steps, even in the developing world, being automated.  Most of the steps but one ..  sewing.

 

Sewing has been fiercely difficult to automate.  A variety of approaches have been tried, but fabric stretches and threads move non-linearly and are not simple flat sheets.  A skilled seamstress ( in the developing world over 90% of the sewing is done by women) is performing difficult computations and manipulations.  

 

A few researches took the hammer and tongs approach of taking high resolution very high speed (1000 frames per second and higher) video of the fabric and figuring out where every thread is and how it is moving.  This information goes to small manipulators - fingers if you will - that move the fabric into just the right position as sewing takes place.  Researchers at Georgia Tech made the most progress and a company was spun off - SoftWear Automation.  It was snapped up buy Tianyuan Garments Company - one of the largest apparel manufacturers in the world.  They've announced a plant in Little Rock, Arkansas with 21 production lines of Sewbots.  The cost goes to about thirty cents a tshirt - about half that of  a woman in Bangladesh sweatshop.  The factory will produce 23 million tshirts a year for Adidas - all made in the US by a Chinese company.  Costs will fall furthers in the future.

 

There are any number of vexing social problems that should be solved.  Very few people will be needed for automated sewing production. Currently about five million women in Bangladesh alone depend on the meager wages they get from the lowest cost apparel makers.  Conditions can be awful and the wages far too low, but for many this is the step above true poverty.  Of course other things need fixing such as education and the place of women in society, but fully automating apparel will put real pressure on millions of people.  One hopes we don't repeat the terrible labor phase problem that plagued the Industrial Revolution, but I wouldn't count on it.

 

Current systems only work for a limited range of clothing like t-shirts, but jeans, dress shirts and uniforms are considered solvable problems that will fall in the next year or two.  Within five years the industry should start feeling an impact.  There are other problems.  A good overview of current ethical and environment issues is Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline.

 

Back to the sizing problem.  Apart from lower costs and domestic assembly, automated sewing offers the potential of clothes for any human size and shape at a reasonable cost and for almost any design.  The technology for body scans is well developed and could be scaled quickly.  Paired with flexible manufacturing lines - probably within overnight delivery range and quite possibly owned by companies like Amazon - your measurements could be matched to designs in a day or two.  About five years ago I predicted this could happen in ten years. I think we're still on track, but it is likely to be a premium for awhile with the major focus being slashing the costs of current fast fashion and mass manufacture and creating an assembled in the US branding.  

 

Other potential changes like the disruption of how design is done and who owns it and perhaps low cost seriously advanced machines for home or fabric store use.  I haven't carefully reviewed the IP, but perhaps there's more of an opening than for 3D printing.

 

making things and change

Twenty years ago an anthropologist in my department was studying the relationship between teenagers and technologies - specifically how they adapted to new technologies quickly sometimes developing novel uses not seen by the inventors.  She observed that although adults assumed the kids had some natural deep knowledge, in fact the teen models of how the technologies worked was paper thin and often wrong.   The skill was a facility to use the technology.  They were effectively technology idiot savants.  

 

In a way we are all idiot savants with technology.  On the desert island none of us could build even the simplest integrated circuit from sand, let alone something as simple as a steel knife.  Civilization is built on accumulated knowledge with deep knowledge necessary for making being mostly narrow and isolated.  Understanding how and where production methods can be used is essential in any kind of manufacturing. How would you go about making Saran Warp?  How about a glass bottle? Where would hydrodynamic machining be useful?  What are the variations of forming sheet metal?  How do production techniques scale? When do you invest in an entirely new technique?   Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design by Chris Lefteri is a terrific book.  It isn't very deep - a page or two for a few hundred techniques, but Lefteri's explanations and illustrations are very clear and give a sense of what might be appropriate for a wide variety of products and scales.  As a bonus you'll probably be the only person in your circle who knows about jiggering and jollying.  Go for the 2^nd edition physical book.  The ebook is a disappointment.

 

Which brings us to Tesla.  It was suggested I say something about the 'revolutionary' Model 3 given the fact that about 350 thousand people gave Tesla a thousand dollar interest free loan in exchange for a place in line for a car that hasn't been publicly tested and probably won't be produced in any volume until well into 2018.

 

I don't consider any of the Teslas to be revolutionary.  I don't mean to take anything away from them - their cars are among the best in the world and they've managed to built an incredibly strong aspirational brand.  If you want to make a car in low volume and don't worry too much about cost or making a profit, you can take a route similar to that of the Roadster ..  buy a roller from an established company (Lotus), bolt on an electric power train assembled from off-the-shelf components, bolt on a body and focus the engineering on something that would surprise people.  None of this is easy, but it can be done a few dozen engineers, a few years of hard work, good timing and the right financial backers.  In fact a similar approach is used by many of the few dozen boutique supercar and hypercar makes.  

 

The Model S was an exercise in understanding limited conventional production.  Again there is no innovation (other than perhaps the sales model, but that exists outside of the US).  There were teething problems, but they managed to keep their well-healed customers delighted and focused on performance that is desirable to that nice.  It gives you the ability to build a nearly five thousand pound car that can accelerate nearly any Ferrari or Porsche - although it can only keep up this power level for a very short time before blowing through the battery's charge.  The choice to follow a conservative path was prudent - mixing in innovation would probably have killed the company.

 

Musk has stated his goal is to get other car makers to go electric for the environment.  A noble goal and the other makers will go electric by themselves, but I doubt many people buy Teslas for being green.¹  They're buying the brand.  With the Model 3 the company has to figure out volume production and profitability.  Somehow the plant tour managed to impress the reporters, but it appears to be a rather conventional, albeit new, metal stamping facility.  It can be done - there are several existence proofs, but there are also more than a few failures.  

 

Transportation is enormously complex and has defined the layout and nature of our cities and suburbs.  Commuting takes an average of about an hour out of our day.  Some people are excited by the changes coming with self-driving cars, but general use is quite a way down the road.²  The size and energy use of a car is current fairly rigid and inefficient.  To innovate transportation you need to do something besides the powertrain as that just leaves you with a functionally equivalent vehicle.  Real change is most likely to take place in how cars are made.  After all, the last major innovation in the US came from Toyota in the 70s with high quality vehicles made using just-in-time production and enabled and educated production workers. 

 

Most cars are built using unit-body (monocoque) construction.  Metal is bent and welded together to form a structure that replaces the older technique of bolting a body to a rigid frame.  With proper design both techniques can produce safe vehicles, but unit-body is cost effective only with very large production runs.  A set of dies to make a model goes for about $450 million and has a lead time of over two years.  A maker tries to stretch out a design's life to recover the initial die cost. And this is just for one type of metal. Ford spent something north of two billion on their aluminum F-150.  They'll probably be under a half billion on the next design change, but the material change was a big one.

 

Small production runs still use welded steel frames and increasingly some form of composite construction like carbon fiber.³  There are many ways to do this, but they've been slow and expensive.  The best car production lines have a dwell time of about a minute - no production step can take longer. Carbon fiber has one step that, cure time, that is often measured in days.  Until now that is.  BMW has it down to about five minutes with the i3.  Five minutes corresponds to about 250 cars per day or something around 80,000 per year.  I'd wager five minutes will drop over the next decade.

 

The video (a tip of the hat to Horace Dediu for pointing it out) interviews Sandy Munro, principal at the legendary automobile fabrication cost analysis firm of Munro & Associates on their tear-down of the BMW i3.   They're famous for aircraft and automobile costing analysis - completely tearing down something not only to understand what went into it, but how it was made.  Sandy calls the i3 the today's Model T.  They've torn apart several hundred vehicles and this is the one that blew their minds.

 

BMW's composite tooling for the i3 is costs a third to a quarter as much as conventional unit-body tooling.  It should be quicker to bring a new model on line and you don't need to build a million units to recover your cost.  On the other hand it doesn't scale past 80,000 units per year, but perhaps the design flexibility offered by an electric vehicle offers to make a much wider range of vehicles better targeted to user needs and regions.   BMW mentioned that Apple visited for talks.  It isn't clear where the discussions went, but almost certainly i3 production technique was the central topic.

 

In a decade imagine a smaller electric car (the i1?) that has a top speed of under 35 mph and is only used in an urban environment as part of their transportation infrastructure.  Some European cities are talking about excluding gasoline cars from downtown regions.  Paris' Sunday without cars was wildly popular.   Highly constrained driverless cars will be possible in five to ten years depending on city and how strong new traffic flows can be enforced (think China and a few European cities).  They'd use much less energy to get around and pollution released in the city is little or nothing.  A city like Paris might buy a large number as an extension of their transit system - or perhaps companies would compete.    With maintenance and a modular electronic and battery design they might have a service life exceeding 30 years.  Something like this might be a plausible early major step towards autonomous vehicles. 

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¹ An electric car is a rather poor use of resources if your goal is reducing carbon emissions in the short term.  Given the current mix of electric power generation and localized distribution some parts of the county an electric vehicle is currently counterproductive.  But the advantages, other than limited range, are huge and it makes sense to support early production as the generation mix will hopefully become cleaner with time.  It will take awhile as fewer than ten percent of the fleet is replaced every year.  When unsubsidized prices cars with a 200 mile rang appear there will be an issue with battery production and charging facilities.  All of that will sort out, but production ramps rarely align in complex technologies.

Would I buy a Model 3 or a GM Bolt?  Perhaps.  I've driven several electrics and although I'm impressed none of them currently meet my needs and budget.  We tend to buy cars thinking about the three standard deviation uses.  The sort of thing that makes people who rarely haul things buy a large pickup.  We only have one car, but a 200 mile range certainly covers 99% of our driving.  We could rent for the outliers.  But we'll see...  

If you really want to be green that is a different conversation...  Some of the most cost effective strategies aren't obvious.  

² There will be limited use on clear and low density freeways fairly soon which will probably be followed by restricted very low speed urban use - probably beginning in China in five to ten years. What most of us will see is an increasingly smart car that helps us with the task of driving.

³ Composite covers an enormous range.  As a teenager I made composite model airplane wings with styrofoam/balsa structures.  Carbon fiber usually refers to a carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Lots of flavors, but CFRP - carbon fiber reinforced plastic - is a common variation.

Bicycles point to some of the most interesting CF construction techniques and CF bikes are now the norm in the over $2k class of road bike.   I don't like the ride quality compared with some of the more exotic steel and titanium frames, but that's just personal taste.  There is no arguing with the fact that carbon frames are lighter weight.

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no recipe today, but a comment on energy

 

If you divide the energy used by the country by population you find that the average American uses about 14,000 watts of power around the clock.  An electric range element on high takes about 1,500 watts - so think about almost 10 of them running constantly - that's what the average American uses.   Multiply that by the hours in a day, week or year and you get the energy used for the period.  I've attempted the calculation from the bottom up.  It turns out to be impossible to do accurately - you have to account for the embedded energy in stuff you buy the food you eat and even that used by government - but  with a few assumptions you get in the ball park.  I can account for a rough average of 14 kilowatts and Sukie and I have reduced our individual consumption to about 6,500 watts each.  Europeans tend to be in the 5 to 7 kilowatt range, so our household is sort of European.  It hasn't been easy and it would be very difficult to go lower.

 

Going vegan saves about 500 watts.  Adding 10,000 air miles adds about 1,000 watts.  (think of 15,000 miles of flying as turning on an extra electric element on a range and leaving it on constantly). Using Uber adds as the average Uber car only has a passenger for a bit more than half of the miles driven, plus urban Uber users are statistically shifting from more efficient mass transit.   Upper middle class people tend to go well over 14kW each.  Note I've avoiding talking about how that energy is produced.

 

Now think about the 14 kilowatt level. The back of the envelope way of looking at it is ~ 125,000 kWh of energy a year (a year is a bit under 9,000 hours).  If your electricity is 10 cents a kWh that's $12,500 a year.  Of course electricity is more expensive at the residential level and a bit cheaper at the industrial level.  Plus much of the energy is in the form of hydrocarbons which are less expensive (coal is a couple of cents per kWh).  In any case energy costs are often hidden, but are non-trivial.

  

about the same as the number of stars in the milky way

I was about eight when we acquired our first five transistors.  They were in a portable AM radio that didn't need to warm up and ran on a 9 volt battery.  It was something of a revelation to me.   Up until that time the only portable radio we had wasn't terribly portable.  An ancient box with four vacuum tubes, it required two different batteries - a 1-1/2 volt A battery and a 67-1/2 volt B battery.  These were expensive and hard to find, so running the radio meant using its electric cord.  The closest thing we had to portable was the five tube Philco radio in the Ford Falcon.

 

It was possible to count the key components of home technologies back then - the number of electric motors, vacuum tubes, transistors - as everything was discrete and physically large.  As I got a bit older I learned what each was for and could wire up basic circuits eventually making some of my own design.  Learning how they worked was the gateway drug to amateur radio just as playing with small microprocessors,  sensors and code is a gateway drug to possible futures now.

 

Unknown to me at the time people were beginning to work on changing the world.  The transistor had been invented at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ with the intention of improving long distance telephony.  To maintain its monopoly status AT&T made a deal with the government that made inventions from the Labs generally available.  Bell Labs could work in areas that impacted telecommunications, but could also follow paths that branched away as it had become an invention engine for the country.  New companies sprouted - notably Fairchild in Silicon Valley - and new branches of invention and innovation emerged.  By the mid 60s a silicon revolution was well underway.

 

About 50 years ago Gordon Moore published his famous paper outlining what has become known as Moore's Law - basically a projection that a dramatic improvement in the performance of silicon based electronics would extend for a long time.  It didn't come from a vacuum.   Moore was working on putting multiple transistors on a wafer of silicon and wiring them up - early ancestors of what we would call integrated circuits. It was clear the elements could be made using a lithography process and that shrinking was possible.   The question was how far could you go.

 

Moore was at Fairchild but had a strong connection Carver Mead at Caltech. Mead was interested in the physics of silicon transistors and was able to work out that it should be 'easy' to shrink individual transistors to about 150 nanometers without running into fundamental problems.  This was something of a staggering result for Moore - Mead's numbers were more than 100 times smaller than anyone thought possible.  

 

Mead was interested in fundamental limits rather than those that were limiting manufacturing.  Moore's conjecture was that the lure of greatly improved performance and lower prices was enough to fund whatever it would take to solve the technical problems of manufacture along the path.  At its core Moore's Law is a fundamental belief that sufficiently motivated people can be very clever and accomplish amazing things.

 

Fifty years, trillions of dollars, and an enormous amount of human effort and we're below Carver Mead's conservative limit by about an order of magnitude.  There are certainly limits and perhaps it makes more sense to think about the amount of power required for computation, but fifty years is a good point to sit back and take stock of the progress made to date.

 

I have a iPhone 6 Plus - the gold 64 GB version.  A quick back of the envelope tells me it has slightly less than 290 billion transistors - quite a jump from five in that old transistor radio.¹  

 

My iPhone has roughly the same number of transistors as our galaxy has stars.²

 

There are a lot of transistors in the world.  An estimate by Dan Hutchenson VLSI Research suggests 2.5 * 10²⁰ transistors were fabricated in 2014.³ That's about eight trillion per second.

 

Moore's Law slowed down a bit about ten years ago.  There is still progress, but other metrics like average power consumption per unit of computation are becoming centrally important with mobile.⁴  We may complain about the lack of progress in batteries - most technology does not follow the same steep slope of Moore's Law - but there have been improvements...  

 

I think of A and B batteries and smile...

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¹  The vast majority of the transistors are in the memory chips and A8 processor.  Other chips may have up to a few million transistors each, but ignoring them turns out to be a rounding error.  The flash memory is MLC NAND - each transistor can store two bits of information or four transistors per byte.  My iPhone has 64 gigabytes, we we're talking 274.88 billion transistors (remember a kilobyte is 1024 bytes) for the flash.  It has 1 GB of SDRAM so another 8.59 billion transistors as SDRAM uses one transistor per bit.  Finally the A8 processor is advertised at over 2 billion transistors.  So something north of 285.8 billion considering other components - probably just under 287 billion transistors.

Also note that something like a smartphone has about 99% of its transistors devoted to memory.

² Current estimates of the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy are in the 200 to 400 billion range.

³ I don't have access to the input numbers.  You can do some crude checks.  The VLSI Research number gives about 36 billion transistors per person.  This works out to about 100 billion transistors for the 2 billion or so connected people.  With smartphones obsoleting in about two years. An average smartphone (including the cheap ones) probably averages something under 100 billion transistors so we're in the ballpark.

The increase in transistor fabrication has been so fierce that you only have to consider the past 3 or 4 years before earlier numbers are become rounding errors - also going back much further and the devices are no longer in use.

⁴ It is well beyond the scope of a quick post, but Moore's Law had at least drivers in addition to human ingenuity and will.  One was the extreme scalability of photolithography.  The tools may seem expensive, but they've been able to generate increasingly vast and inexpensive output even as designs shrunk and became more complex.  And there is Dennard scaling.  In the mid 70s it was discovered that the current and voltage required to switch transistors shrank with their size.  Without this chips would have quickly melted down and defied any shrinking attempts.

Currently something of an explosion of ideas is underway of where we go beyond Moore's Law.  The rough principal still applies - devices will become more powerful in some meaningful way - just not exactly what Moore conjectured.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

I made a  chocolate cake to celebrate the birthday of a vegetarian friend.  It is based on an eggless chocolate mousse.  The trick is to use avocados.  I won't go into the full cake other than noting the first layer is a shortbread with a lot of cocoa powder.  The chocolate mousse goes on that and everything is covered with a chocolate glaze and then a semi-sweet chocolate is peeled over it (anything darker than about 50% doesn't peel cleanly).

 

The chocolate mousse recipe is about right for a 7 or 8 inch round pan.  I used a small 5 inch pan and made several. Adjust as you see fit

 

Avocado-Chocolate Mousse 

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 ripe avocados

° 100g dark chocolate, melted (I used 70% Lindt)

° 2 tablespoons dark cocoa powder

° 100g white cane sugar 

° 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

° 1 pinch salt

° 1 tablespoon coconut oil

° 3-4 tablespoons coconut milk

 

Technique

 

° Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse for 5 minutes or so until smooth.

° Add coconut milk as needed to thin is down.

° Spoon the mousse over the base and level 

° Refrigerate the cake overnight. 

° The next day, remove the cake from the pan and transfer it on a platter.

 

 

cars 3.0

Get behind the wheel of a car from 1950 and you probably can figure out how to drive it.  Cars are now vastly more refined, the highway system is greatly improved and cities and suburbs have been shaped by the automobile.  But the basic car, at least to the driver, seems like it has only seen incremental change.  Very few of us had gyrocopters or jet belts in our garages.  The notion of ground transportation hasn't changed very quickly.

 

Around 2000 a new future looked possible.  Radical technology changes were getting closer to commercialization.  There were new power-trains, navigation systems, and DARPA had programs looking ahead to self-driving vehicles.  Terrific change was rocking the mixture of communication and computation.  Would we see much in transportation, or was the current incremental change likely to continue for the next few decades?

 

Think of a car as a skateboard that an interior/body assembly is bolted to...

 

I had been to GM a few times as part of a program where a few AT&T Research types spent time talking with R&D counterparts at important AT&T customers.  The visits were not about what one company could do for the other, but a rather joint look into what different sectors thought was cool.  It was an education into where researchers thought technology was going and where innovation might occur.¹  

 

The prototype was still in simulations and small models - a blank sheet of paper.  The only design constraint was it had to be hydrogen fuel cell based.  The motors (one for each wheel), fuel cells, batteries were all part of a rolling chassis that looked like a skateboard.  Control would be drive-by-wire.  With the low center of gravity handling could be impressive.   I was told a million mile motor was 'easy' - the real problem would be the fuel cells and the acceleration battery.  But this was a blue sky concept - little details like practical fuel cells and a support infrastructure were details for the future.   Plus the Bush administration was dumping billions into fuel cell R&D.

 

Manufacturing could be streamlined.  By trusting computers and going drive-by-wire you could make a common chassis and a wide variety of bodies. The technique was a step back from unit body construction - the old body-on-frame technique used on SUVs and pickups.  There could be an enormous amount of design flexibility.  If fuel cells and batteries could be made to last - or at least were replaceable as modules - a person might own a vehicle for 15 or 20 years periodically going in for a new body that would fit their needs better.    There could even be a standardized design that allowed local suppliers to create snap-on bodies that might only appeal to very limited regions.

 

The electronics came in modules that weren't as co-dependent as current cars.  The notion of the rats-nest of wiring harnesses went out the window and would be replaced by fiber optics cables offering huge savings in construction and repair costs.

 

I pushed the point on fuel cells as even people at DARPA thought batteries practical for military applications.  Why not give up on long range vehicles and sell something to segments that covered the vast majority of driving in the US?  After all, it was just a different way of segmenting a market.  

 

There was a long sigh.  At the time he didn't have much faith in fuel cells either, but that was one of the few parameters he was not allowed to alter.  GM was getting large sums of fuel cell R&D funding from the feds and the EV programs had been internal disasters.  Also important European and Japanese competitors saw a hydrogen future so he had to address competitive issues.  

 

It seemed like he was addressing points from a viewgraph.  Finally he looked up at the ceiling and changed gears.  Ultimately, he said, everything from motorcycles to airplanes would use electric power.  Efficiency demanded that.  The real question is when.  At that point we started talking about electric airliners - probably the first time I thought about turbo-electric hybrids as transitions and air-metal batteries.  Our hour meeting had gone on another three hours before I had to call it quits to catch a flight.  Stories for another day.  One thing he said about cars - about his skateboard - stuck with me...

 

design flexibility

 

What if Apple made a car?  Indeed.  The Wall Street Journal and others have been publishing rumor reports of a secret program within Apple.  It could be something minor blown out of proportion - a remake of CarPlay for example.  It could be a different serious focus on the infotainment layer - or perhaps the intervehicle communication layer ..  or any number of things. I obviously don't know anything about it, but Apple has been known to design.  If Apple did build a car, what might it be like?   I state up front that I'm very skeptical that they'll do something in the first place - it would take partnerships, mergers, and several years.  They have the money, the design talent, and enormous patience.  So with that a few thoughts - most are likely to be wrong, but they might spur deeper thoughts.

 

the CAR

 

I'd focus on a pure electric.  The current internal combustion engine may be mature after 150 years of refinement, but has about two orders of magnitude more parts than an electric motor, needs a lot of care and has a limited life, only has a 25% or so thermal efficiency, vibrates, produces nasty combustion byproducts, is expensive and introduces design limitations.  Batteries are much further along than fuel cells when infrastructure is concerned and are currently less expensive with encouraging signs of breaking even with IC cars in some segments in five years or so.  Additionally the drive train efficiency of a pure EV is much greater than a hydrogen fuel cell EV.

 

An electric car currently costs a boatload of money to add enough for long drives.  Most people have short daily drives, but have a few long trips a year.  Most people, buying a car, think in terms of rare use scenarios.  What if we pack in four extra kids or need to carry a 4x8 sheet?  What if we drive to Florida rather than fly? What if, what if...

 

What if you think in terms of transportation as a service?  Perhaps a car could be made to focus on only a few niches and you buy it as a service?  Or what if you buy the car and its battery pack is somehow offered as a service?  Perhaps the cost of electricity could even be included.  And batteries will improve.  Not as quickly as memory or cpus, but they'll improve.

 

A properly designed EV can last a long time - remember what the GM guy said.  I'm a fan of the modular skateboard chassis and electric skateboards are easier than the hydrogen fuel cell variety.  I buy the car and keep it for 15 or 20 years, but along the way I change the body every three or five years to match current needs.  Make the electronics modular for easy hardware upgrades along the way and more frequent software upgrades.  If I need long range I can rent something with an IC engine - perhaps at a discount.  Or perhaps I can rent an aluminum-air primary battery for 1,000 mile range for long trips.²

 

Batteries are still evolving.  Elon Musk is making a bet on a very conventional vehicle with a large battery pack that uses a conservative chemistry.³  With luck he might hit his design goals. Apple, if they made a car, might be more flexible and start with something conservative moving to newer chemistries if they pan out on appropriate time scales.  It is all about production management - something they're rather good at. Risk could be mitigated by selling the packs that have aged past automotive grade, or the use of them, to utilities or transmission companies.⁴ Apple already has large agreements with electric utilities.  There may be interesting synergies.

 

Everyone is talking about fully autonomous cars and dreaming about the future these days.  I'll claim we'll see much more automation, but full autonomy is some way in the future. For now fully autonomous vehicles are the gyrocopters and jet packs of today.  But in the nearer term one can imagine a variety of transportation as a service and transportation on demand scenarios.  

 

To think about costs you have to consider specific scenarios, but a very long lasting platform that forms the basis for a service could be interesting.  A fun area of speculation even if Apple isn't doing it - after all, where's their large screen TV.  Potentially this 'feels' more interesting than Uber or Tesla in their current form. 

 

but

 

And this is a very big but..  Cars are enormously complex to deal with compared with what Apple is doing now.  Dealerships, repairs, regional safety and emission standards, huge plants and so on.  There are a lot of moving pieces to get right and it isn't clear the profit is there.  In the end say they could do it if they wanted.  They could do a lot of things.  If this is real I'd guess it is a prototype to see if they could make something and add enough value to make it worthwhile.  A few hundred million isn't a lot of money to Apple these days.  If they pulled a trigger, figure four or five years to any kind of production unless they buy someone.

 

Transportation is broken and broken equals opportunity.  Although Apple is good at working with broken system, they have also demonstrated a clear ability pick and chose.  Their strength is knowing how to say no to ideas that lack potential for their ecosystem and focus on the few that do.  In the end I'm going to say - no, it won't happen as a car.  But there may be other connections through Apple's growing ecosystem.  Who knows, perhaps your 2022 Ford, Toyota or BYD will be an accessory to your iPhone - a different form of  CAR.

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¹ These programs had been around for decades - at least back into the 1950s.  Usually with University counterparts, but also with select industry sectors.  The NDAs were such that findings were kept within the R&D organizations. 

² If you throw out the requirement to recharge and add energy to the battery during its assembly remarkable energy densities are possible - at least five and possibly ten times as much as a Lithium-ion secondary battery. The cost is greater - perhaps about as much as an IC car, but they can be recycled and may make sense for long trips. Alcoa has an interesting program.

³ Folks who do battery research call themselves 'battery guys' (there are some gals too, but - you know - sexism).  They make a point that Tesla doesn't have any battery guys to make the point that Tesla is very conservative.  

⁴ After 1,000 to 2,000 charge cycles a lithium ion battery falls to about 80% of rated capacity and is generally replaced.  It can still be still very useful in fixed energy storage and power management schemes.  In short there is a non-trivial used value.

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Recipe corner

 

not my own, but too delicious not to make.  I'm linking to Jeené's sweet potato cake.  A true vegan cake, it is a bit flat and dense, but delicious and easy to make.

 

 

 

metastable states, richard milhous nixon and the apparel business

Curiosity about apparel and fashion have become something of a hobby and I'm putting together some thoughts for a talk to people with a lot of background knowledge.  In thinking about possible trajectories, I've been spending some time looking at how we got to where we are - not only has their been a dramatic move to mass produced apparel, but there has been a dramatic shift towards very low cost production, low quality clothing and shrinking delays between design and delivery.  I won't go into much of that, but something really interesting happened during the 70s - a period when several forces conspired to rapidly accelerate change in both the industry and the consumer.  But first a bit on metastable states.

 

Consider a landscape that is flat on the left moving towards some hills as you move to the right.  An object under the influence of gravity will move to the lowest point.  A ball that finds itself on the plain won't magically move up the hills.  If the ball is in the valley labeled b it won't move to the plain or the valley c unless you give it a kick.  Even though  being on the plain is theoretically more stable, it is stuck in  a stable stable.  If I get it a kick to the left it can roll up the little hill and then zip downward.  Likewise a harder kick to the right could land it in valley c.  a, b and c are all stable - the overall system has three metastable states.  The ball can only move from one to the other if some outside kick is applied.

 

In the early 70s Richard Nixon was faced with several trade issues.  Cheap imported clothing from Taiwan, Japan, Korea and a few other countries were on the radar screen as American apparel companies folded under intense competition.  Nixon had positioned himself as a hero of the American worker and ginned up multinational support with European countries that having similar problems and a massive trade agreement - the Multifiber Agreement or MFA - was signed.  

 

South Korea and the others suddenly had a big problem.  Enormous factories and production capacities far beyond the trade limits.  The MFA was killing their business.  But it was a very complex and targeted agreement and, in that focus, came a way out.

 

About this time a few people in Pakistan were frantically looking for new businesses to pull the country out of total poverty. A chance meeting took place with Daewoo in South Korea and an agreement was hammered out.  The MFA quota was specific to South Korea, but didn't say anything about Pakistan - after all - Pakistan was a basket case.  

 

Daewoo set up a facility in Pakistan and trained Pakistani managers.  Problem solved.  Similar agreements were made between other pairs of countries and the spiral to the lowest cost producer ramped up.  

 

Nixon, in trying to focus so tightly, had supplied just enough energy to kick the ball up the hill so it could roll into another valley.  The system had been perturbed and settled into a new metastable state. And other influenes were being felt.

 

Container shipping was emerging as as a way to move massive amounts of goods to ports around the world at very low costs.  It was often more expensive to ship clothing within the America than from Pakistan to an American port.  People began to get used to cheap apparel - it wasn't made very well, but cheap trumped all and closets began to fill.

 

The impact of the shift started to take its toll on American firms, but now Reagan President and he had little appetite for protecting union workers.  Buying patterns were changing.   Companies like Daewoo moved upscale, but did so with high production and lower quality.  What was being marketed as mid-quality wasn't built to the standards of a decade earlier.  Vintage boffin Jheri notes you don't find much that is newer than 1980 - the quality had dropped so much that little of it is worth repairing.  

 

Clothing had become an expendable.  There is an interesting connection between this and the notion of what fashion is.  Fashion was now being dictated more than assembled and marketing changed instep.¹  This continues to accelerate and now we are in the era of fast fashion - where a design can move to production in a few weeks and to the shelfs in six weeks by boat or almost immediately by air.  There are so many rich threads (pardon the pun) and now, with entry of a few new technologies and rich "word of eye" communications on the Internet, we may be on the edge of a new major change.  It will take time to move a $1.7T industry ($350 to $400B in the US), but there has been massive change in the recent past.  

 

Perhaps the industry will get excited to the point where a new metastable state (or states) will be found...

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¹ The history is much more complex and interesting than this - consider this a 100 mile view.  There are a number of fascinating books on the subject.  For the current state I recommend Overdressed by Elizabeth Cline and for the current state of production and a bit of history try The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Petra Rivoli.  Jheri thinks about this quite a bit and has a guest post here.

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Recipe corner

 

A winning pecan pie that isn't as supersweet as those made with karo syrup.  I realize good pecans are nearly unobtainum this year.  A friend sent me a nice supply, so I'm set for the season.  I love to bake, but tend to give things like this away as I don't want too much of this sort of indulgence.

 

Maple Pecan Pie

 

Ingredients

 

° an unbaked pie shell (use whatever technique you prefer.  I like a good graham cracker crust or a convention flour/butter crust for this one)

° 215 g (about 2 cups) of coarsely chopped pecans 

° 55 g dark brown sugar

° 25 g tapioca

° 3/4 tsp salt

° 240 g (about 1 cup) grade B high quality maple syrup (the dark brown grade)

° 60 g heavy cream

° 1 tsp vanilla extract

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 425°F

° lay the pecans in the pie shell

° whisk together the sugar through salt in a medium sized bowl.  Then whisk in the maple syrup and cream.  Finally whisk in the eggs one at a time.

° pour over the pecans and pop into the oven

° bake for 20 minutes and then drop the heat to 350°F for another 30 minutes.  

° let the pie cool on a rack for at least an hour before serving

° top with a good ice cream or whipped cream if you want something over the top