Most of you will have a tool set, but coming round the corner is a change to the way we make things so fundamental that it will render almost all current fabrication tools obsolete.
It’s a development of the rapid prototyping technology that is used in industry today. Things like stereo lithography where full size plastic parts are formed in a tank of fluid by using lasers, a computer model of the part is effectively printed in 3D.
A variation of this uses a MIG welder on a robot arm, building up a metal part a layer at a time.
The idea that you can just design something on a computer and press the print button to get the real part is amazing and its driving a whole industry forwards. Soon the parts will be good enough to be used in production, cutting development times for new products dramatically.
But its not just big corporations that will benefit, small scale units are being developed for the hobby market, initially just making plastic parts but other materials will follow over the next few decades.
So not only will you be able to design your own mounting brackets but also a new dashboard, wishbones, spoiler or exhaust manifold. In fact you could down load the CAD files for your favourite engine and make all the parts, you could even scale it up to make a ten litre Jaguar V8, or possibly scale down a Rolls Royce Merlin to make it a few inches shorter to fit in your project.
The possibilities are boggling.