I started in Sector 67 about five years ago. I got a mechanical engineering...
...degree. We are a community work space, it's also called a hackerspace or a maker...
...space. We're essentially a gym club that allows people to come in and work on building...
...things. We are now five years later up to about a hundred members consistently
All of our membership is month-to-month, so people of course come and go as they got...
...projects and tools or are in town otherwise, but more specifically we've
got lots and lots of people working on lots of different projects, everything
from people making costumes, halloween is coming up so we've got a lot of interest
in those things, all the way back to somebody just need to fix their car and...
...be able to get to work on Monday. So many members working on many different things
I will say one of the most valuable things are seeing over time as these
tools get more and more accessible whether it's 3d printing or laser
cutting or machining or any number of things, or just hands-on...
fabrication, we've seen these tools progressively get simpler and
progressive they get more and more open to more people. To the point now where
you don't need to have an engineering degree to use a lot of these things. You
can sit down you can figure it out you can work your way through it in a safe
way that's going to ultimately allowed to accomplish something successfully. So...
in having the machine actually only for about a week, really if you count once we got it,
we had to find some space in our shop, we're a little bit tight in here so...
you need a little bit room cleared out to get it set up. Having set that up and...
...getting it going.
The first thing we played around with was actually the passive tool probe, which is...
really cool
we've never had one and we've never been able to play on that so we spend a
little bit of time read the manual which is a good place to start and getting
things adjusted and squared up and it's within about 2 ten thousands of an inch now that we're..
...able to get precise and repeatable measurements. And so being able to go on to...
the conversational mode and say find the corner of my stock was awesome and it
was way better than sitting there with an edge finder trying to find the edge
and figuring out where our tool was setting the offset wrong and watching the cutter
cut air because we're off by a half-inch or whatever and it was a lot easier to do
that then it was normally, so that's been something that we played around with and it
sounds like a bit of gimmick until you mess with it then you realize how much
time you save on it, but second to that
getting it setup
and like I said we're cutting some trailer parts for a motorcycle and we'll
see how that project progresses he's got some welding work to do and some other
things to get those pieces actually joined up but that'll be a fun fun
project so one of the things we did in the machine right off the bat as we
fired up the conversation mode and set up to engrave we just put a piece of
acrylic and just to see how it came out and it came out really well I think one
of the biggest challenges we'll have is keeping people away from it. Every time
we fire it up he get a giant group of people watching the thing around and
seeing what's going on one of the other big man who's this machine is being
overrun flood coolant so being able to set up in knowing that you're getting
good chip Reid clearances and getting all the chips away from the caller is
really helpful I'm ready seen doing where a lot lower than we're getting
another machine and I think that's going to be really helpful for you know those
spend less time educating people about babysitting the counter and more time
talking about how to make those patterns and make the patrol passed to get this
thing going on and making making parts rather than talking about all the ways
of not making parts properly so that i think is going to be one of the biggest
most helpful things with that is just setting up hitting go and knowing that
it's gonna run consistently every time so when I created sector 67 you know I
didn't really know what I was in getting into what I was getting into be teaching
all these people how to use all of the tools on the equipment and over time as
we have growing and growing
and awareness and understanding about how to use a lot of equipment when I
started at never used a laser cutter never use the CNC router never used the
milling machine that was fully automated we actually didn't have access to US
Agency machine it's cool we're still running parts off by hand I was one of
the last graduates who left a machine shop before they really got a lot of CNC
equipment was accessible so you having graduated with that and then having
started the space in today now I need to know how all the equipment works until
the train people on how to use all the stuff that's been a really valuable
experience over time to have gone myself through the process of learning these
things so the prosecution others and I will definitely agree that you'll never
learn how to use something better than teaching somebody else how to use it
because you realize things that you take for granted or assumptions that you made
all things that people don't know so having to go through in turn people off
on how to use the equipment when something really been invaluable to me
as a person to grow and learn in that capacity and being really teach people
things never started a good teacher you learn how to be a better one so it's
been fun day out as well