Having gone through the painful exercise of building robots in the US, I appreciate the problem. Our end-end supply chain latency was 16 weeks, far too long to scale effectively to match demand. Many component changes we wanted to make would have created a 6-week delay, so we had to compromise. A place with a factory across the street that could make screws in 3 hours sounds like heaven.
"What would it take to create a factory that could make an arbitrary fastener in 3 hours?"
There are things like having material stock, stamps, etc. But if you look at a screw factory one of the things that jumps out at me is that all the machinery is old old old. Which is to say, the typical fastener factory seems to have machines that were originally tooled up to make war material in the 40's and 50's.
Today, I've sintered carbide cutters, lasers, and machine tools that can repeatedly cut to a tenth. So why can't I build a factory which uses programmable tooling (aka 'soft tooling') that can produce thousands of fasteners per minute? The process can be made parallel in a very straight forward way, more production stations.
Not a YC startup, but how do we get investment in this kind of idea? Can we even? I love reading some of Elon's comments about how ossified the space manufacturing industry is, and how they created things in weeks that the 'experts' were saying would take months or even years to make. We've got Jeff Bezos pulling F-5 engines out of the Atlantic, can we get him to fund the most amazing fastening company ever? Such that any fastener in the catalog can be produced in quantities from 1000 to 1,000,000 with a process where manufacturing costs are fixed across the volume window?
If not, why not?