Crucible has the tool room, where you can check stuff out. It does require someone to be at the toolroom to do the checking in and out, so you need to figure out how to staff it. There is also the issue that at the end of the day, everything has to be checked back in before the toolroom attendent closes up for the night. This happens when they are locking up, no 24 hour access there. It also takes up a lot of space. The toolroom at The Crucible is probably bigger than all of sudoroom.Techshop has most small simple tools out in the open, where you can just grab something and use it, and hopefully put it back in the right place when you are done. Those tools seem to get misplaced pretty quickly and it becomes hard to find what you are looking for. Some other tools require checkout from the front desk staff. Some of these are tools that require training to use (tool holders for the Tormac CNC Mill come to mind), or are sets of things that want to stay together (tap and die sets, drill bit sets). I think they might also keep valuable stuff (micrometers) up their.-steve
On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 9:37 AM, Ronald Cotoni <setient@gmail.com> wrote:
About the tools. I was at the crucible. They basically have a room that has the tools with a window. I was there for an event so I didn't get to see it in action or ask but I bet you have to sign tools out and that way things don't go missing as easy.
On Mar 13, 2014 8:55 AM, "Yardena Cohen" <yardenack@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Hol Gaskill <hol@gaskill.com> wrote:
> Also relevant to reboot and an ongoing concern of mine - the shop area. Is
> it big enough to be useful as a shop? How does it compare to other
> hackerspaces? Does it need to be co-located with the main space or does it
> make sense to have it offsite? If we added a satellite workshop somewhere
> else, would the space be more usable for other purposes and make moving
> everything less of a priority?
Thanks for asking this, Hol. I've been sad about the shop area for a
while. Some parts have been getting some love recently, and I'm very
happy about that! Other things have disappeared and become harder to
find. My last straw was last night, when one of our community members
came by with a simple need, to file and hacksaw something. We found
one very large file but not the smaller file we used to have at some
point. We could not find any hacksaws at all. I know we had some
before. It felt very symbolic. How can a hackerspace not have a
hacksaw? We literally cannot hack!
Personally, having all of these different elements in one physical
space greatly increases the value of everything. While he was visiting
he told us about the exciting solar panel project he was working on,
and found potential leads for writing controller software for it. This
was a conversation that wouldn't have happened if the shop were
offsite, and I can't help but wonder how many more of these
interactions we miss out on, by not having a good enough shop area.
While there are challenges to having sawdust and metal shavings in the
vicinity of laptops and food preparation, I think it's well worth
meeting them. Noisebridge has a wonderful shop area - at last month's
reprap building party, Miloh showed me some wonderful tools that had
stayed around since 2008! All they had to do was enclose it. I think
for our new space, an enclosed work area is a must. I'm afraid of
sawing anything at Sudo because it commits me to then spending 10
minutes trying to track dust down behind a thousand nooks & crannies.
And I'll still never get it all. People who came just to hack on some
Javscript will leave coughing and rightfully upset. We took the
cheap-upfront route, and we've been in debt ever since.
Another example: our particle-board floor has been a huge limitation.
I can count a number of projects, including a metal-printing one,
which didn't happen or moved elsewhere because you just can't do it
safely over our floor. It's unsanitary, a dust/germ/toxin magnet, hard
to sweep, hard to vacuum, hard to find things you drop, easy to
dent... We could learn something from Double Union, a space that
recently opened in SF. When they rented their room, the very first
thing they did was tear out the carpet and seal the floor in hard
resin. Imagine the pain we would have avoided if we'd done that in our
current "Art Studio"! Well worth the money, IMO.
Which, speaking of money, my observation is that a lot of people who
were involved in Sudo's early stages - 2011 & 2012 - were hoping for
the fab & maker angle, and were disappointed by our meager facilities
and started putting their money & energy elsewhere. I think reaching
out to this crowd should be a component of our reboot. Our values and
energy are so important - let's try this again. :)
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-steve
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