Starforge. Director's Cut ;)

A summary of our latest shenanigans.

So originally there was an older version of this blog, but I didn’t really like how it flowed so here’s a version two that hopefully harnesses more brain cells.

Well, it’s been a minute since I gave a proper update, and in a nutshell, it’s all been going great, 46 members, 1 student org ( s/o Aggies Create!), halfway to breakeven within a month of opening, tons of new machinery, lots of fun.

So for context, we opened the makerspace across the street from the main engineering building on campus about a month ago with a pretty quiet opening. There was and still is a lot of small things that need to be done so we just launched and started taking memberships as soon as we could provide any value. It’s been a really wild and fun journey over the past little while. Kind of hard to convey what exactly has happened, but I’ll give it a go.

In a nutshell, we’re off to a banger start, tons of paying members, a lot of equipment either already installed, or in progress or en route. Notable ones include this massive 4 by 8 foot welding table we built.

That thing is so ridiculously heavy, it took like 5 guys to get the top into the shop. e built it upside down then built a base next to it then just set the top on the base. The thing is so heavy that we didn’t even need to weld the top to the base. Reason being is mostly because we don’t need to, but also if we ever want to move it outside a door, we can easily disassemble it. This was very much a 1 day build and it was so much fun!

We also moved the test stand off the trailer and inside the shop. It’s gonna become a huge publicity toy for us, so when I get the chance I’m gonna put big wheels on it, a giant battery and hook up rgb and bright white lights to it. I’m thinking about filling it with liquid nitrogen and having it smoke in front of the engineering building, but that might be a little too scary for most sane people. It’s not scary to me because I know LN2 is inert and almost perfectly safe, but others see rocket engine + smoke = FEAR.

Less wise heads almost prevailed there.

Our boy Matthew found an absolute steal of a CNC mill. Truth be told we had no idea we could afford one of these puppies, but while we were looking for just a regular mill, he saw this thing on facebook about 2 hours away, offered the guy $1700 and we got it the next day. It’s a 3-axis cnc and manual mill ( meaning it can do both modes) with a 2hp motor. It came with a bunch of tooling, a stand, and just is gonna be a whole lot of fun. I’m so pumped for this thing, I’m gonna make all sorts of things on it, new rocket engines, new longboard trucks, all sorts of new things. I’ve always wanted to get into CNC mills and now we have one!!

The possibilities with this thing are crazy. It’ll be a huge money maker. It and the laser are two super profitable machines. We can definitely easily make back the cost of the laser and this thing with just a couple jobs on each.

We’re getting a lathe soon on loan from the UIUC LRI boys ( shoutout Ian). It’ll be on the top end of the mini-lathe Chinese machines. So long as we can get it working, we’ll have a lathe to use. We’ve got some people wanting to bring in some nicer welders, that’ll happen depending on the new electric plugs we install in the space. It’s rather surprising how willing people are to just move their equipment into the shop and let other people use it. It’s been a serious help because that’s all equipment we don’t need to buy.

Going to be focusing way more on community work. I think for now we’re done with buying large expensive machinery and are pivoting more to running community events, getting people in the shop, always making sure things are happening and keeping the organization alive. I think we’ve definitely reached a happy minimum of tools where we can actually offer value. We used to run these pizza socials every week, but they died off and people kept coming to them only once or twice, with some happy exceptions of course, but regardless, they weren’t working so we pivoted to weekly buildathons.

Every week the makerspace members go and build something cool together. The first week we built a pretty awesome picnic table. Not sure what we’ll do next time around, but it’ll be interesting. We’ve got some issues to fix with the way we ran the event last week, but that’s what is nice about hosting these things so often is that we can iterate pretty quickly.

In other exciting news, me and the boys are flying out to SF tomorrow morning for the rest of the spring break! We’ll be meeting a bunch of cool people, heading out to FAR to watch some engines make fire, and check out a bunch of cool places. Lmk if you are in SF and want to meet.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say, this is mostly an update post. Ngl kinda have writer’s block.

Anyways, cheers!

Ismail