[Animats]

Local manufacturing only works if you're in a place where there's a lot of manufacturing, or your product doesn't really require much manufacturing capability. You many need to be in a place where there's someone down the street with a 20 ton press. If you need a 20 ton press, you need to be in a place where at least three shops have one.

If you're making things which are basically PC boards, manufacturing is not too hard. Making boards and soldering parts onto them has a well developed workflow. There are lots of board houses and board-assembly services. If you design for what a pick and place machine can do easily, things usually go well. Hint: production is surface mount today. This is a pain for people who are used to prototyping with through-hole parts.

Kickstarter-class startups seem to have excessive problems with making cases and panels. Tooling for injection-moulded plastic is difficult and expensive. Once you get it right, the parts just fly out of the machines at a few cents per part. The production process is just getting warmed up on a run of 10,000 parts, and few Kickstarters get there. Basic truth about manufacturing: most of the processes are really cheap if you're making enough items, and far more expensive for short runs.

[jacquesm]

20 Ton presses are $200:

http://www.harborfreight.com/20-ton-shop-press-32879.html

Agreed on the injection moulding, that's expensive (and rightly so). But a simple press is not going to be a showstopper on any budget.

If you're going to do sheetmetal manufacturing there are a ton of companies waiting to get your business just about anywhere up to a reasonable volume. Manufacturing hasn't completely moved out (yet).

Small series, prototypes, even your first batch of some product can usually (definitely not always) be manufactured locally in just about any country.