From cars to space travel, the store is where it all begins

From the April 2023 issue Car and Driver.

I once held a bicycle that went into space. Well, I was holding a prototype bike that went into space. My father was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the Mars Exploration Rover program and brought me along to a family open house while Opportunity and Spirit were under construction. I remember the blue NASA meatball on the building and a sign from the main aisle pointing one way to Space Flight Operations and the other to Cafeteria. Even today, that pretty much sums up all my desires.

Dad showed me the clean, white-walled rooms where scientists in bunny suits tested cameras and solar panels, and the machine shop with its multi-story, five-axis mill and vending machines full of drill bits and lube oil. In the automated, CNC section, a machinist let me press start on a new part. Later he handed me the finished piece, an aluminum wheel still wet with milky cutting fluid. This modern blacksmith shop turning scraps of material into spaceships blew my mind. A few years later, rovers sent back pictures of the surface of Mars. I felt like I was there too with my bike and I’ve loved visiting the shops ever since. I want to see how things become things, which is why I thoroughly enjoyed two recent factory tours of assembly plants that are perfecting manufacturing techniques cherished for a century.

Divergent sees the future in 3-D (print)

Let’s start in the future, where our components will not be cut from blanks or cast in waterfalls of molten steel, but grown from hot sand under a laser green sun. Divergent Technologies specializes in additive manufacturing, known as 3-D printing. The company’s focus is on expanding the industrial utility of 3-D printing, which today is better for prototyping and small runs than for large-scale production. Divergent hopes that by using AI-optimized design to plan part of the engineering model to installation, additive manufacturing can become faster and more affordable.

Divergent can test its theories straight from the printing presses. Its founder, Kevin Zinger, and his son, Lucas, operate their hypercar company from the same complex, a suitably futuristic glass black cube in Torrance, California. A red Czinger 21C stands just inside the door. Behind him, a collection of assembly robots stand in a circle like sci-fi satanists, preparing a ritual with UV lights and high-tech epoxy. The rooms smell of glue and hot metal. It’s silent, no whirring welding machines or spinning drills, just the low hum of electricity as groups of laser sintering machines build the chassis parts from dust, one glowing layer at a time.

Bentley keeps it old school

Across the Atlantic, in a brick building on Pyms Lane in Crewe, England, Bentley Motors balances growing production needs with buyers’ expectations of old-school craftsmanship. Tasks such as spraying varnish on wood veneers and tracing the cutting pattern on the more than 14 leather hides needed to outfit the Bentayga have been outsourced to computer brains. Polishing lacquered wood, checking hides for imperfections, and sewing intricate patterns are still done by hand, partly because some things people still do better, partly because it’s tradition.

For die-hard Luddites, there’s always the Mulliner Classic follow-on program, which offered a dozen customers the chance to own a brand new 1929 Bentley Blower, and will soon begin with a series of Speed ​​Sixes, all built the traditional way, with brass hammers, swearing and Earl Grey. The ’29 fan spoke wheels were never in the same room with a CNC machine, but I got the same thrill touching them as I did from the rover wheel. When we witness creation, we can travel through space and time.