Are you a veteran and live near a TechShop? If so, then you should know about the TechShop program for veterans, developed in partnership with the Veterans Administration. It’s a free one-year membership plus $350 for training classes.
This is the second in a series of posts called Making Makerspaces, a distillation of the information gathered for a series of How to Make a Makerspace workshops produced by Artisan’s Asylum and MAKE. These posts will appear on a more-or-less weekly basis, and will focus on mission-critical topics related to founding and running creative manufacturing space. Today, we’ll be discussing common types of expenses and income that makerspaces around the world experience on a regular basis in order to help you create a business model for a space of your own. In the process of identifying these expenses and income, we’ll review examples from several well-established spaces across the U.S. for reference.
The past decade has seen the sudden, dramatic appearance of community spaces offering public, shared access to high-end manufacturing equipment. These spaces are interchangeably referred to as hackerspaces, makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs. This can lead the intended audience to become incredibly confused as to why there might be so many names for a single concept. I’d like to take some time to untangle the mess, explain the concepts behind each title, and talk about why I now make significant distinctions between all of these types of spaces.
MAKE’s 2013 Hardware Innovation Workshop is only days away, and we still have a few more makers to feature as part of the “pitches with prototypes” contest. Next up is the Lumiglass Infinity sign by ProtoTank. We have featured a few variations of edge-lit displays before, but the ProtoTank team has turned it up a notch with their unique materials and display system.
TechShop‘s newest store is now under construction in Pittsburgh’s Bakery Square. With our public opening planned for February, we want to hear from Pittsburgh area makers who’d love to help other makers and aspiring makers build their dreams. If you, or someone you know, would like to join our community as TechShop staff, see the […]
Turns out, a woodshop class isn’t the best place to chat – noisy saws and vents, coupled with a constant vigilance over not losing a thumb. I was glad to see Travis again on Wednesday morning, with a window of relative quiet in the shop, and to hear more about how his journey was going.
Making is as much about exploring as it is about building. Exploring new ways of problem-solving, understanding how things are made, how machine components fit together. And this week, for me, about exploring new tools.
