- I like to think of a maker space as kind of an enabling system for people with severe Attention Deficit Disorder.

If you stumble from one creative venture to the next and about the time you reach mastery, you lose all interest in that particular artistic venture, then the maker space might be for you.

This is a way that you can learn something until you've gotten all the dopamine mind out of it you possibly can and then go learn something new the next day and not have to feel bad about leaving piles of unused craft equipment in your spare room.

Many years ago when I was a blacksmith, I suffered a tragic loss of our blacksmithing facility to fire.

And it meant that many of the creative outlets that kind of, made up my creative life, were not available to me.

And so I moved on, did other things for a while, and years down the road in a woodworking business, 2008, the economic collapse killed the manufacturing company that I was working for and again deprived me of a whole collection of useful tools that I could use to use the opposable thumbs to make awesome things with.

And I realized that this must be true for a lot of people, that they reach some stage in their life where they've developed skills that require some sort of physical infrastructure to apply.

Whether you need table saws or you know, a black smithy or welding equipment or just a big open table with good light to work.

You might be in a situation where you can't manage that.

You live in a small apartment or your neighbor's complain about your anvil in the backyard or that sort of thing.

And so there are this, there's this need for people to have a space to be creative in.

So at Hammerspace, we like to make it possible to do creativity without any boundaries.

So we have sewing labs and 3D printing labs, sculpture labs.

We have an electronics lab with world class soldering irons, oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, all of that.

A wood shop with everything you could need from A to Zed, in woodworking table saws and router tables, to drill presses and radial arm saws, panel saws, planers, joiners, all of that.

And then we've got a metal shop, which is my personal domain where I like to work, and it's full of blacksmithing equipment and welders and grinders and machine tools of all varieties.

So if you can't make it at Hammerspace, you should probably hire somebody to do it for you.

I think you could best describe our members as a rogues gallery.

There are so many different types of creative people here.

I mean, we have people who are fascinated with titanium and build everything out of it.

We have former architects turned digital designers of complicated custom objects.

We have sculptors who work in steel and other sculptors that work in wood.

We have special effects and prosthetics, makeup artists and costumers and cosplayers and swordsmiths and everyone in between.

Classes are primarily our way to reach out to the general public and provide a set of skills that will let you get into a new craft like blacksmithing or silversmithing or woodworking, to get your foot in the door and learn the basic tools and sort of make and take for adult creative people.

It's nice to be able to have a starter project that you can anchor a few skills to, so that the next time that you go into the shop, you're not just bewildered by the many options in front of you.

So when a new member comes into the space and they want to use a tool for the first time or an old tool in a new way that they haven't used it before, they just hit a button that we have on the wall that says, I need help.

- [Robotic Voice] A human will be with you in a moment.

- And that has our AI here contact us and tell us that someone needs help and where they are.

And then we go out and we find out what process they're gonna go through.

And that lets us teach someone how to rip a board or crosscut a board or bend a piece of steel or make a simple weld or any of these other operations as a one-off training experience where they can learn how to do that one thing in isolation very quickly and safely, so that they can get on with their project, rather than trying to eat the entire elephant at once, we want to take it one little bite at a time.

One of the ways that we differ from a lot of other makerspaces is that we have services that we provide beyond simply access to the tools.

So if we have a digital tool like a laser cutter or a CNC machine, it's very common for us to have that as a service only tool where an operator is going to take your design and turn it into a finished object for you, using materials that we keep on hand.

I really like to think that that's what a makerspace is for, is we're taking that hot, fresh idea that you just, you just had right now, you and a friend are talking about something amazing that you'd like to see birthed into the world and you realize that you can just go do that right now and strike while the iron's hot and make the thing while the monkey on your back is still actively screaming, rather than six months or a year from now when you finally get your ducks in a row and have all the tools lined up.

So, that to me is where makerspace births ideas.

It's an engine that just makes reality come out of your head more easily because you've removed the obstacles to your creativity.

It's why I do this.