Tuft the World's CNC tufting robot: carpal tunnel, a $75,000 machine and the 'handmade' question (2023–2024)
Research finding · not yet checked at the source
- Made by
- Tim Eads; Tiernan Alexander (Tuft the World)
- Date
- bought by 2023; reported 2023–2024
- Place
- West Philadelphia
- Held by
- Tuft the World
- Themes
- Companies & modern tufting, Hand-tufting tools & the gun
Cite this source
Research notes
This record is about the machine itself and complements event-ttw-editions-2023 and co-tuft-the-world. Technical.ly (Aug 2024) says co-founder Tim Eads bought a CNC tufting machine after hand tufting aggravated his carpal tunnel. Eads says the machine makes tufting accessible to people who cannot tuft by hand and gives consistency and evenly stretched backing. Users still adjust tuft density and row spacing by hand and change yarn colours and tuft heads, and the article notes makers disagree about what counts as handmade. Design software splits an image into colour blocks and toolpaths. The Philadelphia Inquirer (Oct 2024) calls it a '$75,000 wonder robot' that works a cloth 10 × 13 ft. WHYY and Paradigm Gallery describe AI (DALL-E) images vectorised for the CNC; Eads said 'This is not really my work… I basically curate.' Size conflict: Technical.ly gives the machine as 16 ft tall × 24 ft wide; Paradigm gives fifteen feet tall × twenty-four feet wide. Both give rugs up to 10 × 13 ft. TTW's 1stDibs listing describes pieces as 'robo-tufted and hand-finished in Philadelphia'. The machine's maker is not named. Sources: https://technical.ly/civic-news/cnc-machines-rug-making/ · https://www.inquirer.com/arts/tuft-the-world-philadelphia-20241025.html · https://whyy.org/articles/tufting-art-rugs-artificial-intelligence-paradigm-gallery-philadelphia · https://www.paradigmarts.org/blogs/news/tuft-the-world-ttf-editions Research note (Oct 2026): from search results; pages not opened.