The opportunity for the west is that an engineer with todays resources can work on building [1] for $5-10k and get into the DC motor business from your shed. Im working on this myself right now, I want to try and start an autonomous manufacturing company here in Australia, maybe I'll start with motors

Are you winding something in an incredibly specialized kV / wattage / torque or something? DC motors are incredibly inexpensive, how could a hobbyist sell them?

The only problem with PM motors is magnets. Everything else is trivial.

Rotorlab (rotorlab.com.au) are or were doing this in Australia. They had a couple of posts about their machinery: a winding machine, CNC mill, etc. I believe they were bought out pretty quickly by a US company. Can't recall who though.

The problems with Australia are:

1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.

2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.

Companies survive longer when you buy from them

> you

No, that is only one customer. There need to be lots of customers for a company to survive. So, ideally you recommend, based on good quality.

You take a bit of a gamble if you need warranty or customer service later on.

Some sort of network effect again, I suppose. There's a better term that's can't find now.

People tend to buy from companies with reasonable quality products.

Australian made products unfortunately do not pass that initial hurdle..

> Motor winding is an amusing problem.

Also really difficult to do, with huge tradeoffs depending on whether the construction is 2-core, 4-core, interpoled 4-core, coreless, slot-wound, salient poles, and many more configs and winding types. In particular cheap salient-pole motors can be wound directly with automated machinery while better slot-wound motors need to have the coils formed first, then inserted into the rotor slots, which is a manual process and complicated further by the fact that the coils are skewed to minimize torque ripple, no-one's really managed to automate that process yet.

So if you saw a factory making a mixture of salient-pole motors for toys and slot-wound motors for serious use you'd see exactly what TFA is describing, salient-pole automated, slot-wound with human operators.

If you want to see what real highly-automated Chinese manufacturing is like, look at one of Bunny Huang's videos on electronics assembly. Then for contrast look at the videos of how it's done in Pakistan.