Manufacturing is hard, even for something “simple” like a pencil:

https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp...

Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back)

Anyone who starts sketching out what a space manufacturing complex looks like (e.g. Drexler, myself [1]) comes to the same conclusion Drexler did —- there is this diverse residue of difficult to manufacture small but complex things. The good news is that we have molecular assemblers, they built you, and now that people are decoding the “junk DNA” we are getting a handle on genetic regulation networks and will be able to make them much more productive and reliable.

[1] unpublished study on manufacturing sunshades on an asteroid which is rich in something which is more-or-less “coal”, out of a lack of imagination I assumed it was going to use a pyrolysis system like https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasifi... and I can tell you that sort of thing on Earth has almost as many things that can go wrong with it as a fast reactor

Related: "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance". My favorite passage mentions Henry David Thoreau, who was a pencil maker by trade.

    Thoreau seemed to think of everything when he made a list of essential     supplies for a twelve-day excursion into the Maine woods...     But there is one object that Thoreau neglected to mention, one that     he most certainly carried himself... without it he could not make     his list. Without a pencil Thoreau would have been lost in the Maine woods. 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734155/

Henry Petroski's excellent book The Pencil[1] uses the same subject to explore the history of the pencil's development into the common artifact we know today.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/The-Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance...

That is an excellent essay, probably why the "artist" used a pencil in the first place. And Henry Petroski did a whole book on the evolution of the design of the pencil in the early 1990s: http://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp/...