PCMS-Admin | Port City Makerspace

December Newsletter: Make the winter months more interesting with classes and gifts from the makerspace!

Upcoming Classes
Glass Bottle Cutting Workshop December 17th @ 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Intro Welding December 18 @ 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Intro Soldering December 22 @ 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Intro to CNC Routers January 19, 2017 @ 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Intro Soldering January 26, 2017 @ 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Free Open Hack Nights!
Every Friday Night 6pm-8pm
Bring a project and work on it in our Electronics Lab or Classroom Space. Share, meet, and collaborate with other makers.
(Note: Next year we will be calling these “Open Create Night” to avoid confusion. Originally named after Life Hacking and the focus on clever ways to make/repurpose stuff.)

Holiday Closure
The makerspace will be closed to non-members between December Sunday 25th 2016 and January 2nd 2017. If you need to contact us you can send an email to shop@portcitymakerspace.com, but our phones will not be answered during that time. Thanks!

Want to host a meet-up in our common area? Submit a request! Groups can meet for free!
We want to know…
We know we want to expand the share workspace offerings we have here beyond just the metal, wood, auto, and electronics spaces, but we need your help figuring out what to do!
Tell us what space you would want to be available here, and how you might be able to help get it set up!

Fundraiser with other non-profits!

Five non-profits, including our makerspace, were selected by the Fabulous Find this month of donations! For those that aren’t familiar with it, the Fabulous Find is a thrift store that dedicates its sales to supporting other non-profits related to the arts, environment, food pantry, fuel assistance, animal shelter and educational organizations.

The non-profits they select each month receive a portion of the sales generated during that month. A couple of us from the makerspace attended the kickoff meeting for this month and got to witness previous organizations receive checks of $7800 each!Help us this month by making your thrift store purchases at their shop!

See our posts about it with #fabulousfindkittery on instagram!

Free Soldering Workshop!
at the Dover Public Library
December 20th
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Back by popular demand! Attendees learn to make simple soldered circuits at the Dover Public Library. Participants will use a hot soldering iron to melt solder and then fuse LED lights to a robot badge ornament for the tree or a light up 3D Christmas tree!

This workshop is already full up, but stay tuned on the library’s page and newsletter for more in the future!

Adult Science Night
at BadLab in Somersworth
December 15
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Alex and Jeff will be doing a 3D Printing demo at Bad Lab Brewery in Somersworth! They will be talking all about how the custom-built 3D printer works, how they made it, and how easy it is to make a 3D print!
Free to attend! Suggested donation of $8.
Ages 21 and up.

One of our members has been doing regular DIY demonstration videos of several projects. You can see larger videos on his youtube channel, and lots of quick ones on his instagram at @residentmaker

The Wonders of Laser Cutters

lasercutterpreview

There are a few tools that every makerspace will probably have: a 3D Printer, a CNC Router, and a Laser Cutter. Our space has 2 out of 3, but that last one, the Laser Cutter, is something our members and community has wanted access to for a long time. There is certainly a lot a maker can do with a 3D Printer and a CNC Router, but the the 3D Printer is limited to plastics, and the CNC Router takes some finesse to get good results. A Laser Cutter is more hobbyist and beginner friendly for cutting out designs for assembling or engraving on a wide variety of materials. It’s an excellent design tool for students and professionals. You can see a bunch of sample projects in this video from Origin Laser.

That’s why we’re organizing a fundraising campaign through our website! By going to this page, or scrolling down a little, you can donate money towards the purchase of a laser cutter for the makerspace! There are various donor levels to say thanks and allow those who donated to have access to the laser cutter once we have it. Please check it out today and donate if you can! Even a dollar will help!

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New Pottery Equipment! Soon, Classes!

2016-07-07 11.57.38

Thanks to a generous donor we now have a nice big potter’s wheel, currently residing in our garage by the Bike Bench. This pairs greatly with our kiln, which we’ve had for about a year now. With these two combined you can now start making pots, mugs, jars, and more at the makerspace!

For those interested in learning we will soon have a class on working with clay and doing firings in our kiln. The potter’s wheel may require a one-on-one class, and will have to be scheduled by interest. If there’s a class you’d like to hear about when its scheduled, see our Class Waiting List page and fill out the form there.

More CNCs in progress

Paul and Alex are working on getting this thing working! When it’s all together it should be a CNC Mill, great for making all your metal parts.

This hardware was donated awhile back and like many projects collected a healthy patina until this week. When we took it out of its dusty resting place, we did a assessment of what it needed. Turns out most of the machine was there, but it needed one leadscrew for the Z axis, and a couple more motors.

Luckily for us we like to save parts for a rainy day, and we happened to have TWO leadscrews that were bigger than the original and TWO motors. Paul did some machining to the various parts to accommodate the new leadscrews and nuts, which took a half hour on the Bridgeport. The new nuts were epoxied in place (the originals were threaded in), and waited for it to dry.

Now most of the hardware is in place, the rest is electronic! It came with a HobbyCNC control board and a power supply, but we need wire for the motors. We’ll likely also need end-stop switches. And the final crucial component is the spindle… which it did not have. May have to scavenge through the parts bins for a good spindle!

If you’d like to contribute to this build, you can make a donation here to help us get new parts!

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What Wood Andrea Works With

Our Wood Shop is probably the most popular part of the Makerspace. It’s pretty obvious why, out here there are tons of hobbyists and professionals working with the wood that is in great supply. There’s also just something about wood working and the culture of New England that goes well together. The DIY spirit is well-entrenched in the people around here.

Below are some photos of projects one of our members has put together with the aid of our Wood Shop space and tools. These are all works by sculptor and artist Andrea Thompson. You can see more of her work on andreathompsonart.com. Andrea comes to our wood shop infrequently, but when she does it’s usually with a fairly big project. The boards you see below were sanded down on our Performax Drum Sander to get them good and cleaned up. With most of them being over 5 feet tall, it made things much easier to feed the boards through the sanding machine compared to palm sanding them. The tall planks themselves are from oak beams salvaged from the Boston Navy Yard after 200 years of underwater storage.
She has dubbed these pieces A Live Oak Dreams of Going to Sea.

These are part of another series she made with tools from our wood shop. The boats are made of cedar and had their rough shapes cut out on the bandsaw; some of the cedar came from our handy neighbors at Ricci Lumber.
She calls this series The Unlikely Vessels

See more of Andrea Thompson’s work

See the next Intro to Woodworking class and other classes

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