One idea I thought of is to build stuff out of wires. We already have very thin wires – you can buy kilometers of hair-thin insulated copper wire for a few dollars. You can knit the wires together to make flat surfaces. You can make electrostatic motors. It is possible to envision a ‘machine shop’ using parts made out of braided and knitted wire to build smaller stuff out of wire. A big problem, however, is that you need some way to cut the wires, and you can’t make wire cutters out of wire. A solution is to use focused lasers – you can use them at any generation of the process down to the sub-micrometer scale, and beyond that x-rays could be used. It would probably never work, I just thought I’d throw it out there.

There is a lot of overlap in the RepRap/nanotech world. It won’t be too long before RepRaps are capable of building STMs for top-down work and facilitating bottom-up assembly techniques. What’s more it will put these tools in the hands of a great many creative people, raising expectations and creating object library sites like Thingiverse. As part of the RepRap core team, I very much encourage these cross-overs and look forward to future collaboration.

Vik :v)

Here’s a suggestion, based on your own, and the comments to part 9 – how about an official open-source hardware project, perhaps even sponsored by foresight?
There is some info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_robotics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_hardware