Techshop Closes Doors, Files Bankruptcy

Hopefully I'll get a chance to ask Jim the next time I see him. But to speculate based on my own experiences and those of others that I interact with socially there were a couple of huge challenges;

* When you had a project it was "easy" to justify the monthly cost of membership, when you were between projects it was not.

* Scheduling vs flow - you could schedule an hour on a machine tool to make a part, spend half of that hour just getting the machine trammed again from the previous inexperienced user, then discover you needed a small change that you could sit down and make and come back, but the next available time on the tool was the next day. It really interrupts your flow when that sort of stuff happens, and wasting "your" time tramming was always annoying. I and a number of other people suggested that there be 10 minute breaks in the schedule so that when the previous person's time was up, a 'pro' would come over and make sure everything was ready for the next person to start.

* Space to keep things in progress was always tight. If your project was half done, and you need to leave it there over night, that wasn't too bad unless someone decided to come over and have a look at it. There were also some issues where people would bring in some of their own tools and other members would see them over by a project and assume they were Techshop tools. Never a good outcome there.

* Instruction isn't a P/L center. It bugs people to pay to be given the safety lecture, many felt that the lecture on how to use the tool should be part of the monthly membership not an add on. When you go to the gym they don't charge you extra to explain how to use a machine, they do charge you extra if they are consulting on your training program. Similarly at Techshop (and this was more true later) the money is in having someone consult on the aspects of a problem they are more expert on than you are.

* Meetings and outreach, there is a opportunity for a "low cost" membership in a center where meetings can be held for groups of 30 - 100. When the robotics club was meeting at Techshop it was valuable but not everyone wanted to become a full time member just to go to a once a month meeting. A $10 - $25/month 'attend meetings here' sort of membership would have worked well for a lot of those folks.

Those things just sort of pop out easily. The challenge of being too flexible is an interesting one (if you can do any number of things, its hard to support any one area as well as you would like). It gave me a bunch of ideas for my "Prototype Electronics" store idea :-)

Let's stay in touch if you're interested in keeping the bay area maker community together. I started a slack group, maybe we can all coordinate. More details here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Techshop/comments/7d7e0m/san_franci...

I know a number of people, artists, machinists, hackers, entrepreneurs, some who became friends who have used Techshop to jump start their livelihood, startup, or bootstrapped business. I'd like to see the community workshop live on.

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Some alternative options open to the public:

https://thecrucible.org/

https://www.noisebridge.net/

https://www.hackerdojo.com/

http://biocurious.org/

https://www.acemonstertoys.org

http://beniciamakerspace.org/

https://695space.com

https://woodthumb.com/

Some private options, generally by invitation, education, or business:

Autodesk Pier 9

Berkeley Tool Lending Library https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/locations/tool-lending... (You need a library card and I think residence in Berkeley)

https://doubleunion.org/ (Possibly Women only?)

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Edit: Our group is growing quickly! If you have a need for tools, equipment, or have them available for use you should join. Members of Wood Thumb, 695 Space, and others in the community are active. Thank you everyone!

Probably a good time to mention there are hundreds of hackerspaces throughout the USA.

My local hackerspace in San Francisco is Noisebridge[1]

[0] https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/United_States_of_America [1] https://noisebridge.net/

I toured the Techshop in Pittsburgh, and took an industrial sewing class to see how their instruction was.

I have my own workshop with a full-size lathe, mill, etc.

The part of techshop that I thought was fundamentally flawed was the tooling provided. Yes, every section from woodworking to welding to machining had beautiful machines. But that's all they had. There is so much other support tooling and semi-consumables required, particularly, in metal work. You never just use a Vertical Mill to do a project. Where are your cutting tools? your myriad clamping solutions? Your various measurement gauges? That stuff really adds up, too, in price and in quantity.

So when I toured Techshop I was thinking, "none of that is provided, so what? if I came, I'd have to wheel a 300lb dolly of parts and bits to enable me to use their beautiful machine?"

And, no, I don't think the solution was for Techshop to provide that stuff. Just a simple dial indicator or calipers is going to get lost, broken, stolen in very short order.

That's why I went away thinking, "what a shame -- a good idea in theory, but the reality of machine work makes this model of "man walks in off the street and builds a robot" pretty impractical, or at least not nearly easily as a casual daydream would suspect."

Not that it changes your argument, but Techshop did actually provide some of those things, dial calipers, gauge blocks, dial test indicators. You just had to check them out, and not everyone know what/where they were. As far as work-holding tooling, it did seem pretty random and probably varied depending on the location.