[zamubafoo]

I've thought a lot about these problems and you eventually hit the need for stronger than natural magnets. Without electricity it's a hard challenge, but without magnets creating electricity in a simple bench scale is a lot harder.

I ended up thinking that you'd need to do a chemical battery to bootstrap electricity and then with electricity generate the electromagnet to create stronger magnets and then iterate from there.

Your next stumbling block from there would be optics as everything else can be made with horrible tolerances. Even lathes and similar machinery can be made with pretty good tolerances without optics. But when you start needing time keeping or miniaturizing components for improved efficiencies, it becomes a blocking issue.

You also need to discover photo-reactive elements to do lithography, but that's a lot easier since it's just silver nitrate and you'd already have the components when you are working towards the initiate bootstrap battery.

[fragmede]

would you need to rediscover the table of elements and atomic theory in your version of things? There's a lot of a scientific learning we take for granted that is actually important when building a new civilization from scratch.

[bluGill]

How far can you get - there is a lot I know how to do but won't have time to create before I die