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Midlands makers

By Andrew Gregory. Posted

We spoke to Geoff Henderson about Urban Hax, a community interest company (CIC) makerspace in the West Midlands.

How did you get started?

I hate rules. It was the same when Fab Labs came out. You had to buy this equipment, and you had to portray the Fab Lab in this particular way. About five or six years ago we were going to set up a – it wasn’t called a makerspace then – we were going to set up a Fab Lab, and you had to spend £100k on equipment. So you had to have a shop-bought router, you had to have a laser cutter and so on, before you could use the Fab Lab brand. The idea, the principle of the fabrication lab is great, but it didn’t suit our direction of travel (and we didn’t have £100k to spend, which was kind of a stumbling block). So we started small instead.

Whereabouts are you based?

Walsall, West Midlands. We’re in what used to be an old corn mill – a Victorian mill that was an old corn mill. In fact, it’s one of the few remaining Victorian mills in Walsall, an old industrial building. We still have the stable block, and in our stable block are the maker bays. One stable = one maker.

Urban Hax stables

Mark, who’s one of our residents, he’s a guitar maker, a luthier, he rents a stable. We have Carl who’s a carpenter, he rents a stable. Upstairs where you have a cleaner environment, makers rent a desk. We have a jeweller, a fashion designer, a 3D modeller, we’ve got a web designer, and the whole idea of our model is to build a creative community where they can get on and do their own thing, or if they so choose they can talk to their fellow creators and come up with new ideas.

What sort of equipment are you working with?

Upstairs we’ve got the photography studio, backdrops, cameras of course, we’ve got a bank of 3D printers, high-resolution printer, high-resolution desktop laser scanner, large-format colour printer, high-spec laptops and 24-inch monitors so people can do CAD design and graphic design. And there are sewing machines and so on, and it just builds and builds and builds. If the residents make out a case for the next piece of equipment, we will prioritise their wishes.

Urban Hax upstairs

Walsall’s a leather town; there are a lot of leather companies in Walsall, and we made contact with one. I asked them if they did leather offcuts, and they rang me the other day with an offer of maybe two or thee thousand pounds’ worth of high-quality stuff with minimal defects. That’s a resource now for the jewellery makers, for the fashion designers. I want to go on a course now to learn how to work with the stuff.

What sort of things are your residents working on?

Mark, being a luthier, he’s obviously working on guitars, and right now he’s working on a Telecaster-style custom model for a customer, which he’s building out of swamp ash – I never knew what swamp ash was. We have Carl, who’s a traditional carpenter. He’s now upcycling musical instruments to make lamps. We’re working with a guy called Lee, who’s looking to build a car to break the British land speed record by dropping a couple of jet engines into a car, so we’re doing all the prototype modelling of the car, the computational fluid dynamics to analyse the airflow. We’re working on a hydroponic system for growing plants indoors with someone setting up the first zero-waste supermarket in Birmingham. He likes the idea of hydroponics for herbs, so customers will be able to come in and just pick their own fresh herbs grown in the store.

Land Speed bid

We’re designing a flatpack loom; we’ve got a passionate textiles group and that’s a multinational group of Iranian, German, and English makers working together on fashion and textile ideas. They’re working on the idea of a flatpack loom, using traditional woodcraft but also designing some of the parts using a 3D printer – it’s a real mix, and we think that’s the way it should be.

We took our inspiration from MIT and Fab Lab. There’s one in Massachusetts called Artisan’s Asylum, which started off as a small makerspace. They now have 40 000 square feet. Welding bays, woodworking areas, spray booths, and you rent space and storage there. That’s where we want to get to.

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