MFNC Visits with Roy Underhill and ShopBot

Our friends at ShopBot were host yesterday to legendary woodworker Roy Underhill.  Roy's show, The Woodwright's Shop, has been a staple of PBS programming for 30 years.  Many a Maker has grown up enjoying his wit, talent, and showmanship.

Educational kit-maker Ben Harris of Harris Educational organized the meeting that also included ShopBot, Hines Design Labs, and, of course, Maker Faire North Carolina.  Roy toured the remarkable ShopBot facility and was impressed at the machine's abilities.  We all discussed the remarkable history of Makers in North Carolina especially Thomas Day whose furniture and homes are extraordinary.  After our tour we had lunch at the home of ShopBot founder Ted Hall and then went to Pittsboro to visit Roy Underhill's Woodwright's School for demonstrations of traditional woodcrafting.  We topped off an amazing day at the inimitable gallery/lounge/coffee shop/bar/club Davenport and Winkleperry.

As of this month it has been three years since our small group started planning the first Maker Faire North Carolina.  I am amazed at how far we have come and how many amazing people I have met.  Thanks for making it all possible, North Carolina!

Click here to see more photos.

Durham's ShopBot Tools Named a "Company to Watch"

Our friends at ShopBot Tools, makers of the ShopBot CNC system and Maker Faire:NC sponsor, made it onto the Council for Entrepreneurial Development's list of "North Carolina Companies to Watch."

"The main thing about them is that they're here. They're locally run and they're not branches of other larger companies. They're basically North Carolina born and bred," Rose said. "It's a broad portrait of the kinds of entrepreneurs that are creating jobs and value in North Carolina."

Great job! Keep being awesome!

Source: The Herald-Sun

Open Source Objects and Furniture

Having access to a CNC router, LASER cutter, 3D printer, and CNC plasma cutter has changed how I see the manufactured landscape.  I don't automtically assume that I must buy the things I want because it is now an option to fabricate them all.  The decision, instead, is whether it's worth my time to engineer the item from scratch, build it, and then ultimately have the design languish on my hard drive.

I want a marketplace for machine-ready designs: an iTunes Music Store for objects.  I recently purchased an assortment of IKEA's iconic Billy bookshelves knowing full-well how trivial it would be for the ShopBot to cut them out.  I would have been far happier had I been able to download a toolpath from some sort of ShopBot App Store or Ikea's Build-Yourself Store, thrown in a piece of veneered particle board, and not had to drive three hours each way.

There are services and communities that are close to working as a repository of manufacturables but they're not quite there yet. There isn't one that has it all.  Part of that is the industry (few standards, wildly different tooling options, etc.) but perhaps a bigger part is that the culture.  Many of us want to buy things.  I like the mall and I'm in the revolution!

One operation that's in the revolution yet doesn't eschew commercial interests is Ronen Kadushin.  Kadushin's furniture sells in galleries and boutiques (at gallery and boutique prices, mind you) but that doesn't mean you can't have one.  Kadushin's designs are all available for free under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license!

The Bird Table (left) can be made in minutes on an CNC router out of 12mm Birch plywood.  Why don't you go make one now?

The only thing missing is the centralized store for dowloading (buying?) the designs.  When you build that, let me know.