I've been following Project Binky, their painstaking restoration/renovation of an old Mini into an AWD rally car, for years. Sometimes, their obsession over doing things their own way, making yet another perfectionist and thoroughly overbuilt (not over-engineered, cost and labor management are not in their vocabulary) custom mechanical bracket is inspiring, but as an EE this just rubbed me the wrong way.

Building a custom PCB by depositing solder on FR4 with a 3D printer hotend is just ridiculous. And if they'd designed the schematic in Kicad instead of drawing the layout by hand with Inkscape, they'd have made far fewer mistakes and needed far less rework. You can get a dirt cheap professional PCB on your doorstep in under a week, and most of that time is in shipping - and if you don't mind spending a bit more for local labor, it can be a couple days. They've already got the CNC for the job too, so alternatively, if they needed really, really quick prototypes, then with a little V-groove bit and some copper-clad FR4 they could have just routed out the design instead of replacing the spindle with the solder hotend. I don't think they needed that turnaround, though, because this project could have been 100% prototyped on a on a test bench with some jumper wires and designed right the first time.

Is that a sort of Gell-Mann amnesia, in that I'm a decent PCB designer but a terrible mechanical engineer and fabricator, and I underestimate the difficulty of the learning curve in my own field, but overlook where they've wasted enormous effort on solved problems with their mechanical designs? Not sure.

Impressive work lads, but entirely unnecessary.