I had a dream to move back to the Bay Area and put a mill and lathe and surface grinder and all the other good stuff in a garage for tinkering after my PhD, but it seems any job that would pay enough for me to afford such things would probably not leave me the free time to enjoy having the shop.
Yes. Maker spaces in Silicon Valley are doing very badly. I was a TechShop member for most of a decade. They went bankrupt, in a very messy way. I'm currently a "TheShop.build" member, at least for a few more days. They closed their San Francisco location months ago, despite it still being listed on the web site. The San Jose location got a 3-day notice of eviction from their landlord, but they seem to have survived that for now. Rumors of unpaid employees, and former employees removing equipment they'd loaned to the shop indicate that the end is probably near.
The new nonprofit shop, Maker Nexus, is below critical mass. Only 50 or so paying members. (I tried to join, but their outsourced signup site can't send me a confirmation email. So I didn't join.)
What happened? The "maker movement" fad declined. Etsy changed their policies - you no longer have to make it yourself; you can outsource manufacturing. TechShop SF used to have six CNC laser cutters busy cranking out "handmade" crap for Etsy. That stopped. The rest of the place mostly turned out stuff for Burning Man. Rising rents forced shops out, of course.
TechShop tried to pivot to "STEM" or "STEAM" education. In practice this meant teaching middle schoolers to wire up Arduinos. That's fine, but a huge mismatch with the tools available at TechShop.
Autodesk's previous CEO, Carl Bass, thought 3D printing was going to be a big deal, and put money and software into TechShop. His successor decided that wasn't happening and pulled the plug.
It's been a long time since there were people building parts for X-Prize entries.
I don't think there's any public space in Silicon Valley which has everything you need for surface mount soldering. Which is embarrassing.
I'd hope so. Those are cheap. Since their business is supposed to be electronics prototyping, they should have considerably more than that. Like a prototype pick and place machine like a Liteplacer, a surface mount soldering oven, and the setup for using a stencil to apply solder paste. But no. Just basic bench tools.
I once tried to sign up there. I drove up to Oakland, and even though I'd made an appointment, no one was there to let me in and nobody answered the phone or door. Then my car was rear-ended on the freeway, and when I pulled off at the next exit, the other car kept on going. So I had to report a hit and run. While I was doing this someone approached me and hassled me in what seemed to be the run-up to a mugging. Got rid of him and drove back to the Peninsula.
If those guys were on the other side of the bay, I'd be using them.
Oh no, what happened to Moto Guild? The San Jose location is a treasure and has been expanding the space to include more service bays in the last year or so.
The SJ/SV and SF locations appear to be open recently looking at recent photos taken there and there’s recent posts by the owners on their Facebook pages.
Whoa! Seems like Halted was sold to Excess Solutions[1], and that Excess Solution has a retail store[2]. This is really great news! I too was heartbroken. What a great place to visit, geek out about history, and buy cool things.
And WeirdStuff too :(
It's all moved on line... even the market places in Shenzhen are less than half full because everything (even phone repair) is on line.
I was there last month, looked just as full as it had ever been - Seg is getting more consumerish - the place I used to go to to get test fixtures made is now an aisle of drones - more already made stuff than just parts in places but not really all that different