We’re looking for a team to help spearhead a fundraising campaign for our transition to nonprofit! No experience necessary, just a desire to help us grow. We’d love to have members bringing their ideas and driving this. Comment below your thoughts and what you’d be interested in doing to help!
See this thread for more info on our transition - ATXHS transitioning to nonprofit!
To give a little more info here –
We’d like to use this campaign to raise funds for the transition as well as improvements to the space, so there are a lot of components to helping here. We would like to set it up with milestones for monetary achievements. Here are some ideas of things we need help figuring out:
etc.
I’d love to help out with this, although I don’t have a ton of experience with fundraising. Anyway I can help, I’d like to be involved.
Jewelry making. I will make a list of items and cost. Tormach Automatic Tool Changer
Just curious - what kind of jewelry making are you thinking about?
A big way to help is researching and coming up with a list of items or services we would want to buy – tools that need to be replaced or would benefit from professional maintenance service. New dream tools we could get if we raised enough money.
Another big piece of this is going to be a team working together to figure out how to re-optimize the space and make room for some of these additions. There is a map of the space on the wiki here that is not totally accurate in terms of the layout within the space, but is accurate on space dimensions.
A GoFundMe or similar site is definitely going to be worthwhile for personal donations.
I think that there may also be opportunities for us to apply for grants from a number of different sources (don’t know any of the top of my head, but they have to exist). Would love to help get things moving on this front, so please keep me in the loop. I don’t have a ton of experience with grant writing, but know some folks who do. Will reach out to them and see what I can find out.
I find the Elegoo 3D printer very affordable along with the resin (bring your own). The Chitubox slicer is also pretty easy to use and adding / deleting supports easy enough.
Lost wax casting resin is more expensive at $95 / 500g
One kilo of water soluble resin is $45. A UV curing box is also needed. For small stuff a nail curing setup is under $30. No IP alcohol needed (safer) but wash water needs to be “treated” with UV light to neutralize the resin before disposal.
It should be obvious that additional tools (centrifuge etc) would be necessary for investment casting. For precious metal it’s a bigger deal,
But a tin silicone mold will work for white metal. I’m more interested in cereal box rings and jewelry that might cost under $1.00 to make something cool.
Metal smithing. I guess that is very broad. I see that you are doing some bronze casting.
This is what I came up with from compiling on RioGrande.com. I’m not a jewelry maker. I can share my spreadsheet with whoever is a metalsmith. I don’t know what I don’t know. I think the level 3 is great overall set.
For the space or for an individual?
Personally, that toolkit would be what I as an individual would be bringing with me every day to the space to do basic metalworking.
I would expect the space to be interested in purchasing more along the lines of a rolling mill, centrifugal caster, lost wax kiln, the vacuum chamber, etc.
One thing to be careful of with a vacuum chamber is that most of them cause a bloody huge mess if you accidentally manually release the vacuum incorrectly (they suck the pump oil backwards). Given that we’re a hackerspace, that failure mode will become a certainty. We should find one that doesn’t have that failure mode or has electrical rather than manual control.
However, if you really want the hackerspace ethos, watch some of the YouTube videos of various artisans of India producing jewelry. They do some amazing work with really crude tools. What is interesting to me is when they actually invest in a powered tool–that’s tells me that it’s really important.
Of course, if you really want to feel inadequate :), you have people like Clickspring who cut smaller-than-your-thumb teardrop spiral flutes freehand (CAUTION: people who have machining tendencies will get sucked into his channel and lose hours of their life):
thank you. I’m not a jewelry person. We need a real perspective of jewelry making.
Would love to see a full size cnc plasma cutter, or laser that can do metal.
How about a water jet? Metal, ceramic, stone… Smaller versions coming onto the market now.
Waterjets produce large quantities of toxic sludge that requires disposal.
EDM has similar issues.
I’d love to take a glass blowing class.
A forge for blacksmithing would also be neat.
The viability of either shop would depend on finding a handful of skilled stewards willing to share knowledge.
I’ve done a fair bit of blacksmithing and would love to teach a class, but my understanding was that open flames were a no-go in the space. If that ever changes or we can figure out a workaround count me in!
I would also would be super interested in glassblowing!
Maybe there would be a way to develop relationships with some of the specialty spaces over town. There are at least 2 glass oriented businesses in town, and while we have flame and power limitations (thinking of kilns on the second), a mutually beneficial agreement with places that can accommodate some of those specialty tasks could be a way to gain those skills
+1 Blacksmithing
+1 Glass blowing
adding +1 Glass casting (I have never done it - but I do have a book written by some dude in Austin)
Right, I forgot about the open flames thing.
It sounds like the wishlist for our next space should include a hot shop and/or yard space. We’ve been talking about a lot of heat-generating crafts lately.
