#meshmakers

Makerspace 2.0

A couple of weeks ago we reorganized our makerspace, separated the "clean" and the "dirty" areas and all machines got their dedicated place. We really feel that it means a level up with the whole concept, and hope that our community will keep it just as organized as it is. 

Skaperpils // Maker Beer

Do It Together Tuesday at the MESH Makers When planning things for this year, one of our founding members, Filip came up with the idea of dedicating one day every week to be a social building day. We loved the idea, and agreed that Tuesdays from that moment are going to be DIT - Do It Together days.  So every Tuesday afternoon from 16:00 until late me and Adam are there to help everyone with their projects, and generally just working on people's projects. 

It's been 3 weeks since we started with this, and had loads of fun! We tried laser engraving glass and also rubber stamp. Good first trials.

Dear makers,

We have reached an other milestone with our crowdfunding campaign: thanks to your support we have passed 40k NOK and raised 59% of our funding goal. Please keep up the support and spread the word! There are 12 more days left and our goal is to reach 75k NOK, although we can get started with less than that so we set a minimum goal to 50k NOK.

Last week we took the opportunity during the long weekend and hopped over to Stockholm, visited the guys and gals at FundedByMe and the Stockholm Makerspace.

From left to right: Adam, Kriszti (Mesh Makers), Daniel and Pontus (FundedByMe)

First we stopped by the office of FundedByMe

In the afternoon we dropped into the Stockholm Makerspace. The friendly Swedish makers have raised more than 100k SEK on FundedByMe roughly 6 months ago and now they are in the middle of moving into their supercool and centrally located space on Wallingatan. They have a lot of work to do to build up the infrastructure, but once it's done it's gonna be a truly awesome place. We had a chat with Filippa, one of the founders who is also known as the "Scraphacker" ( http://scraphacker.com/ ). She is very passionate about getting people with various backgrounds and expertise into the space which really resonates with what we represent too. We agreed that many hackerspaces have a tendency to be closed or open but passive with regards to involving a broader community (including girls) in the joy of making. This is something that we have seemed to be quite effective at so far with the Fix-It night and the urban gardening workshop.

Filippa, the heart and soul of the Stockholm Makerspace

Either a CNC or a time travel machine

The main space with the guys hacking the doorlock

The future 3D printing cave

While we were sipping our lemonade and talking, the youngest member (17) of the space was working with a small bunch of others on hacking together the electronic doorlock system, the guys responsible for the IT operations were accurately followed the blueprints documenting how the cables are going to be routed, and the oldest member were doing a research with a Make magazine in his hand on which 3D printer they should buy to start with. It was a nice and friendly atmosphere and they are surely going to do amazing things with such a large and supportive community. This was our first visit but definitely not the last and we also hope that they can pay a visit to our makerspace very soon!

We also had a small meetup in our empty space with 25 lighting designers assembling their society in Norway. It was a good test to see that even the workshop area is comfortable enough for a smaller meetup. We are definitely going to hold courses in the space and luckily we also have the opportunity to use other spaces at MESH if needed, such as the café or even bigger event spaces.

Lighting designers of Oslo, ready to be assembled in the makerspace at MESH

Dear makers,

Thanks to all of you for the support, it's been a great week. We have passed 20% of our funding goal and we are looking forward to meet our new founding members in person soon! 

The great thing about a crowdfunding campaign is that it allows us to involve our community early on, therefore we are going to shed a little bit more light on the details of the development based on what happened during the week including the questions you have cared to ask.

Donations

Along with founding members we also got some great machines offered in donations:

Emil loved the idea of our makerspace and he offered his unfinished RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printer to us. This is a very open, hacker style printer which means that those who are willing to build a 3D printer or want to understand a bit more how these machines work can play around and learn more about it without starting completely from scratch. Given its open architecture, this printer can be easily modified to print chocolate for example. We are still going to obtain more closed and easy-to-use machines like the MakerBot Replicator 2 because it's simply more user friendly to work with if your main interest is making with a 3D printer, not making a 3D printer.

RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printer - the picture is an illustration of an identical machine

Pål Øyvind offered his Sherline CNC mill and lathe, which we are very grateful for. We can keep this machine in our space as long as we maintain it properly. These are very versatile, powerful and accurate tools capable of working with soft materials like wax, wood, plastic, but also metals and hard materials like aluminum, brass, steel, stainless steel, and titanium. It's very useful for milling metal parts or electronic circuit boards and molds for molding plastic. The working area of the CNC mill is not too big though so we are still planning to get a slightly bigger but less sturdy one that can be used for making small scale furniture parts.

Sherline lathe & CNC mill - the picture is an illustration of an identical machine

Practicalities

There were a couple of questions regarding the operation of the space and the benefits that the founding members get in exchange of their pledges. We'd like to emphasise that the founding members are the people who make this thing happen, we can only do it together with you!

So, if you help us by pledging 2900kr, your benefits are:

- early access to the space and the opportunity to influence the development early on

- 6 month membership from the official start

- 10% discount on the membership forever

If we successfully raised the money and the campaign is over we are going to open the space in a beta period (roughly 1 month) and we will only take in new members when we are officially open. The price of the monthly membership will most likely be 490kr with a 3 months minimum subscription period and there will be a discount for students, pensioners and families. We haven't completely settled on all the details, but you'll probably get a good idea on our model. If you belong to a specific student organisation in Oslo (for example at UiO, HiOA, AHO, KHiO) you can point them to our project because we are constantly looking for partnerships in order to be able to provide students an even better deal.

Accessibility to the space will be tied to the café/bar at MESH, meaning that it's going to be open from 8 to 23. At the moment we can't and won't promise you access to the makerspace at night. Access to the machines will be based on a shared calendar so you can schedule your machine time to avoid clashes in peak times. Would there be too many clashes on certain machines (eg. laser cutter), we'll set restrictions on the usage, maximise the weekly hours and try to do our best to obtain more instances of that specific machine. But in general, if this or similar issues arise, we'll strive to solve them with communication and trust, instead of rules and restrictions. 

You'll be able to use basic materials for free, such as natural colour PLA filament for the 3D printer, basic electronic components and plain wood sheets for laser cutting so you don't have to buy and bring everything for yourself but obviously we can not offer anything for free. Frequently used materials will be sold in the café.

Regarding storage, we are going to provide boxes and shelves but we don't have enough space to store a motorbike there for instance.

This is it for now, we are busy talking to potential future members now and working on the space, more details are coming soon!

The link to our crowdfunding campaign on FundedByMe is at http://bit.ly/be_meshmaker and you can follow us on Twitter @meshmakers too!

Happy making!

MESH Makers is going to be a space and a community where you can make your creative ideas come to life. We are going to be part of MESH, an innovation hub in downtown Oslo and our plan is to create a unique place and a unique atmosphere, by connecting MESH café with the makerspace. Here, you can create, prototype and develop tangible, physical things, and use inspiring technologies such as a laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC milling, microcontrollers, sensors, sewing machines, a photo/video setup and more. You will become part of a community of makers to be inspired by, learn from and build together with, we'll organise meetups, lectures, workshops, make-a-thons. To make the space come to life we need founding members - to create the space and to set the direction for the community.