In the summer of 1984 my father persuaded Felix Wankel to give him --and me-- a tour of Wankel's experimental workshop in Lindau, Germany. The shop was a free standing building, around a hundred feet square. Except for offices down one side, the rest of it was workshop space. It was configured in such a way that any wall could be removed so stuff could be moved in and out, and there was a system of overhead rails, from which any piece of equipment in the whole shop could be lifted and moved to any spot in the building. And he had every conceivable type of shop machine in there. At the time he was working on a kind of hydrofoil rescue boat that could move through storms completely unaffected by waves. He had been working on this project for many years, but hadn't given up on it yet. The experimental boat was not present at the time (the Lake of Constance is just a few feet from the building), but periodically they'd take out one wall of the workshop, bring the boat in, and make changes.

Anyway, that workshop was the workshop to end all workshops. Glass walls, natural light, every machine tool ever patented (and many that hadn't been patented), and in good weather, a panoramic view of the Swiss Alps (not to mention the occasional topless woman walking by on the beach).