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I just visited this place last night. It's a public-access workshop in Palo Alto that has pretty much every machine your heart could desire and you can play all day! Actually, there's no table saw which would help rip boards, but otherwise it's pretty rad if you have any projects you want to build. Yay! I can use a milling machine again! And the industrial sewing maching would have helped with my packpack mods.

http://www.techshop.ws/equipment.html

That's freaking awesome! If I lived there I would definitely have the annual pass. I just spent $300 on tooling to machine stainless for a project, that $1100 is a screaming deal. Now I just need someone to start one in Bozeman so I can play.

I thought you might like that Will! I don't really need an annual pass, but $30 to spend the day using that workspace and all those tools is a sweet deal. They have a whole room filled with hand tools, many of which would rent for $30/day on their own! They just opened in October and they are still aquiring new (and by new I mean used) machines. I'm amazed that they give you pretty much unsupervised access right now, which I hope lasts.

I sent that site off to my machinist friend and he was amazed as well. We might have to take a business trip there and take all of their classes. It would be a solid part of a machinist/faricator's business plan to pay the $100 per month and work out of that place. I pay more than that per month for the loan on my mill. Lucky californicators!

Well if you come out when there's snow I'm sure there would be no shortage of volunteers to show you around the Sierra while you're here. The one class I took (CNC Milling) was pretty lightweight. They just spent an hour showing us how to set up the machine, but didn't give us a whole lot of other guidance. But it seems like the shop stewards are basically there to provide hands-on guidance. Even if a machinist or fabricator had a small shop, it could still make sense to have a pass there for access to the variety of machines. I'll take some pictures next time I head down there.

That is an awesome idea. I wonder if there are any in colorado. I always though that a ski shop that you could tune your own gear in would be cool. Kinda similar idea only better.

Boston used to have one, but by the time I heard about it, they had already gone out of business. So, uh, if you like the idea, make sure you go sue it and support it!

I visited TechShop this weekend to work on a project. Here's what the workbench area looks like:


A lot of my other pictures didn't come out well. I think I got oil on my camera lense. But you can see the machine room in this shot:


I was building a Yakima rack adaptor for my newish FJ Cruiser. The factory racks for that car are lame, heavy, expensive, overdesigned, and pretty useless. Plus they break. So I made these:


They mate to the attachment points for the factory rack system and they also mate to the Yakima rack system. Everything fit perfectly on the roof:


Woohoo! I'm back in the water!




There's a writeup here if anyone has any interest...

That's bad ass storn, be careful you'll end up buying a mill like me!

Now that you have your design down you can talk to a job shop and have 'em make a box full for ya (or you can do it yourself) then open up your ebay store for storn's aftermarket FJ parts.

I'm sure that yakima logo on your fairing wouldn't stand up to a rag full of acetone if you wanna have it a little more on the DL (I hate having logos all over my stuff as well). Do you think a little rubber between the parts you made and the rack towers would damp out the banshee screaming?

Good work.

I bought the little wing for my yak bars and it seems to do the trick on my honda element. Other thing you might try is just a piece of black foam pipe insulation. might not be the look you're going for either, but I've heard it can get rid of the howling.

Shep

Thanks, Will. I thought you might like that. It's been about 10 years since I've had a milling machine at my disposal and it was nice to find out that the skills haven't totally faded. However, even though my wife is extremely patient with my many foibles, I don't think she would react well to a milling machine in the dining room. So I'll be using TechShop for the time being...

Do you know a good job shop? I may actually make a run of these if there's enough interest. The reaction to them has been pretty good so far.

Yeah - I think I will try acetone on the ferring this afternoon. I tried flipping the plastic over so the logo would be on the inside, but I got barred when I couldn't get some of the fasteners open. Just last night I painted over the logos on the bar pads. I'll advertise for Yakima when they start paying me for it...

I don't think the shrieking came from the bar itself vibrating, but by turbulence eddies coming off the bar and driving vibrations in the roof. When I put the bar pads on the frequency got much lower, although the noise was still incredibly annoying. The ferring took care of it, no problem. It doesn't look too bad, but I'll be stoked to get the logo off of it.

just be careful with that acetone, it'll do a number on your paintjob too if you're sloppy

Maybe being little sloppy with the acetone will tone down the yellow. JK SF