[StillBored]

I like what those guys are doing, but frankly its simply to far away at this point for me to justify the once or twice a year I might want to use a lathe/mill. Partially because I tend to have my own "hacker space" in my house given the last couple decades of acquiring tools.

But, what I think we need to do in Austin is figure out how to get the local school districts to open up the high school machine shops, electronics labs/etc on weekends/whatever. I've seen the insides of Anderson High, and more recently Vandegrift, and both of them have tooling that far exceeds what most hackerspaces can only dream about. They don't have much in the way of pictures of their lab space but there is one on this page https://www.viperbots.org/home of the cleanest lathe you will every see and in the background one if their vertical mills and another picture of a tormach 1100 MX (a ~$40k mill).Plus at least for 3 months out of the year the lockers/etc are basically vacant and there is a few thousand square feet of light industrial workspace along with electronics labs full of scopes, power supplies and soldering stations. Piles of 3d printers, and unlike libraries the noise of a big milling machine isn't going to be heard in the quiet spaces in the library.

So, there are natural hacker spaces all over town if one can figure out how to protect the tools from random idiots and convince the school districts that they can get more mentors/etc, and maybe even raise some revenue if people are willing to pay for access.

PS: In a state that tends to underfund their teachers its amazing how much money a FIRST robotics program can get from industry in the wealthy parts of town when the sponsorships are $5k-10k. Of course its peanuts compared with the football program in many cases. Ex that high schools stadium https://texasbob.com/stadium/stadium.php?id=1312