However, far from there being a "rumor" of its demise, it was the CEO who sent a mass emailing and open letter to the Maker community in which he stated Chapter 7 had been filed, the company was dissolved, and the assets were now in the hands of the court.
As of a week ago there's a new email drifting around (which much smaller circulation*) in which that same CEO says they've sold the company and it will arise anew as TechShop 2.0. And oh yeah; they didn't actually file the Chapter 7.
So one of those statements is or was a lie. Pretty good reason to discount anything the man says from this point out.
*the obvious reason that former members didn't get the second email is because they'd taken down the website and severed their agreements with whomever was handling their membership data before this supposed "Angel" showed up. Good to know the actual members were first in his thoughts.
Oh, yes. And there's a website and FaceBook posts by a fellow who claims to have, indeed, bought "the company." He's a little unclear about whether he bought the assets and took over the leases, or whether he actually bought the company (million-dollar debt included). His only real output has been a web page where he promises Bigger! Better! Newer! Unlimited Rice Pudding!
And no sign of a business plan to actually pay for any of that.
Metal working area, typical weekday
Is TechShop viable? I really don't know. There are several comparative models but those models clash. First there's the gym model. The dirty secret of all gyms is they have too many members. Like an insurance company, a gym's profit margin depends on the misplaced optimism of their members. Their life blood is the New Year's Resolution.
TechShop SF achieved this kind of membership, but not entirely due to the members themselves. There were several things going on; first and foremost, most of the members were occasional drop-ins, coming in on the odd evening after work or on weekends. Their total hours over a month could be counted on the fingers, thumbs optional.
This skews things a bit because TechShop was open all day -- and was nearly empty until the 5-to-9 PM happy hour.
Secondly, most of the members gravitated towards a single machine/class of machines. There were always people buzzing around the lasers. The mills and lathes saw less use, but there was a small core there (actually, the core centered around the underpowered CNC mill). Neither group mixed. There was even the Lab Table bunch, whom I never saw leave the tables to use any other machine; a group which sort of blends into the crowd that seemed to do nothing but talk business plans around the coffee machine, use the CAD programs on the computers near the coffee machine, and lounge around on the sofas near the ultra-fast WiFi connection (and the coffee machine).
So you couldn't look at the active membership and abstract that down to usage of a specific station. Or vice-versa.
And then there was the invisible coterie -- the people I sometimes met at a class or doing a familiarization session on a machine. They'd dip their toes, pay up a few months in advance, but never manage to find time in their lives to actually get out there.
The condition of the Jet lathe, last time I visited
The other side of usage, however, was on TechShop. The machine reservations were in fairly short blocks (and there was no attempt to stack the blocks; two people could make four-hour reservations and leave only a uselessly short two-hour slot between them). The machines suffered a fair amount of downtime. And there were a lot of classes. The last big lathe project I had was delayed for two weeks as every prime block that fit my work schedule was intersected by a class -- eight classes a week, in fact!
None of this is helped by the way people would abuse the reservation system with no-shows. Or that the classes would reserve several machines and then continue to show those as in use well after the class was cancelled for lack of attendance.
And especially not helped by the STEAM classes and similar events that would take over several machines (or block them with their activities) but never warn of this on the reservations calendar.
So it was very far from the drop-in gym model. You could spend weeks trying to get a reservation. And then when you came in, lose most or all of that reservation because of an unlogged user or a broken machine.
Something to keep in mind here is that these aren't one-off procedures. You can't go up, make a cut, then retreat to the bench and let someone else make their cut. On both the various CNC machines and of course on lathe and milling machine, it can take an hour to get everything set up, measured, and aligned. And hours to make the cuts that require that alignment. If you had to stop, if you had to move to another machine or pick up on another day, all of that work would be lost. It is simply that difficult to get back into that same alignment again.
Especially with missing accessories, loose parts, run-out or lack of tram, dirty lenses, misbehaving drive motors, and all the rest, it often took half your reservation before you were ready to run parts. And that makes it very frustrating to have to stop an hour later and knock off for the day, only to go through the entire rigamarole again a week later.
And this is all before considering that to access the machine in the first place you also have to schedule, pay for, and be lucky enough to not have cancelled on you a class giving you permission to use it.
This essentially guts the place for the drop-in crowd.
All of these cuts needed to be made in sequence before removing the blank from the chuck
Here's the user advantage. As a hobby creator I would prefer to come in and tinker with an idea on the laser for two hours, make a few trial parts, then go home and tweak the design some more. Once I moved to production, as with my Holocrons, I needed to be able to sit down and churn out parts for a full shift (if not a full day).
This works, to a point. Of the users who actually show up on a regular basis, half are in production on items for their company or Etsy store. They would gladly pay more to have assured access to full work shifts on a well-maintained machine.
But their needs are orthogonal to those who have never done CNC and want to learn. Who need to go through those hours of not very productive time. And who might in their inexperience break the machine.
Thing is, machines get damaged, and there is negative incentive towards reporting damage or repairing it. TechShop makes money by membership, so until members start fleeing in droves it is a waste of money to do maintenance. On the member side, they already paid a lot of money to get that access, the machine is in such bad shape already and often as not you will find it already damaged by the previous user. And if you do chose to involve staff, you typically found they were short-handed, short-tempered, and short on actual skill. So typical member approach was to grit down and deal with it, repair what you could, and call staff only when you could absolutely show it hadn't been you that broke it.
The extra step of rental sort of worked because those machines were understood to be cash cows. They were kept up better. And the user was tracked better.
The failure of this is that the Trotec users have to pony up membership in addition. This is a sort of built-in problem of the whole arrangement; The person who only ever needs or uses a laser is still paying for every other machine that any other user might want to use.
The several dozen laser-cut parts that go into a single Holocron
So what happens if you zoned the shop? The obvious upside is you move the big dirty industrial machines to a big dirty industrial area where it is easier to run power and where there is parking and access to carry big plates of steel into the shop. Put the lasers and the printers and the CAD stations in a nice office in the City where most of your users can carry everything they need in their packs and you don't need industrial zoning.
The upside to the user is that they could pay a smaller, zoned membership. To make this happen, though, the company would have to make each individual shop/zone economically viable on its own. And I suspect strongly that model would make the more "industrial" processes priced above where the casual user could afford them. But it may be my numbers are off; it could be the costs of a milling machine on Cesar Chavez is actually a lot lower than the cost of a CAD seat in a nice office building just off Market.
Whether it is splitting membership into zones, or splitting it into tiers, though, all of these schemes take away from the essential "Maker" aspect. Having everything under one roof and throwing the Etsy manufacturers and the startups in with the hobbyists and the teens is what generates that creative heat.
And having access to that variety is what made it useful to me.
In one way, though, TechShop was already "tiered." The user experience was, indeed, to be in a room with a whole variety of manufacture procedures and people who understood and used them, but to only have access to a small subset unless they paid extra.
This was achieved, albeit unintentionally, through the SBU system. Over the last year the Safety And Basic Usage class that was a prerequisite for many machines and/or machine groupings bumped up to over a hundred dollars a class. And not just one class. The Wood Lathe was a single class, but you couldn't do as much as cut a chunk of wood to length to chuck in the lathe if you hadn't taken a different Wood Shop class. The typical bite for a use who wanted to start work on the CNC mill was five hundred bucks worth of classes.
(These weren't all requisite; you could technically get by with just the one.)
I think this disincentivized members from straying outside of a core competency. You rarely saw an experienced laser cutter expand into cutting wood or steel using the CNC routers and mills. And it wasn't just classes. Despite the lauded "dream consultants," the view of the other processes and machines a member had was of a closed world; of dirty, dangerous-looking, complex machines which were kept busy by surly people. There wasn't an atmosphere of sharing where you could wander over and ask questions and get a sense of how that other process could be useful to you and how you could go about adding it to your skills.
The SBU's were grossly inadequate. Personally, I liked it. I've always been a self-directed learner, and a very stubborn one. I also love reading manuals. So I'm fine with being told the basics and then having to hammer out the rest by myself. But that isn't something a lot of people want to face.
From any kind of balanced perspective, the classes were just doing two things; they were gouging the paying members, throwing an additional fee at them to try to prop up the business, and they were "selling the experience" to people who hadn't learned enough in the class to actually be able to build on that skill later and who in any case would never come back. It was the equivalent of throwing a few shuttles at a loom set up at a hands-on historical exhibit. You'd had the fun of trying something completely new, but it wasn't like you were actually going on to weave anything.
So in short...yes, a tier system or better yet an hourly machine fee would on the whole benefit the power users, but they represent such a small share of the total membership it may not be economically viable and in any case is a disservice to the spirit of the Maker movement.
CNC milling, CAD, 3d printing, traditional lathing, reflow soldering...
The last prominent model is that of a Hackerspace. These are usually ad-hoc organizations, small and gregarious groups who pool resources to find some used equipment and a ramshackle place to put it in, and who argue and struggle in the ancient roommate dilemma about actually keeping any of it in working condition. It is completely antithetical to a for-profit organization, and when production work starts happening there it tends to bring the whole thing crashing down.
There may be lessons in Hackerspaces for TechShop, but I'm not the one to explore them.
The Tormach CNC mill, in better days
So is TechShop 2.0 going to happen? I am inclined to doubt it. It is hard to figure out what form TechShop 2.0 should take. The very concept of a Maker space depends on mixing inexperienced users with skilled power users. Unfortunately the needs of these groups are vastly different.
For everyone, TechShop 2.0 needs better maintenance and more staff, more classes taught by skilled people, better organization and accountability and a reservation system that works. But these are all costly, almost certainly more costly than a membership basis will allow.
The very membership model is broken for anyone but the most casual user, as projects require layout space, access to a variety of processes (not just one), access and time for iteration, physical access for moving materials and for storage of tooling and works in progress. Traditional hackerspaces and high-end member shops make this possible by having dedicated tables/offices for members. TechShop tried to function like a gym, like an in-and-out burger shop and that's incompatible with most projects.
The TechShop users were also on a for-profit model. They paid a significant membership (and additional class fees), and what they got out of it was to be able to walk in, do the work, walk out. This is entirely antithetical to a Hackerspace where the members walk in, socialize, bounce ideas off each other and (until the whole thing breaks down in recriminations) work together to acquire learn and maintain the machines.
An additional rental fee would help a little, as it would level the playing field between the power users and the casual membership, and it would close the gap a little on keeping those rental machines in better shape. But it would also shorten the time before those power members took their money and bought their own machine -- especially since there is huge overlap between the "comes in every day to laser product for their Etsy store" and the "only ever uses the Ultimate engraver." These users don't have to save for a whole shop. Just the one tool they need most.
Actually, I do have one wild idea. It seems to me larger and larger parts of the Maker movement are about selling the sizzle and not the steak. About doing paint-by-numbers; about offering the illusion of making to people who honestly don't have time in their lives to pursue it. I support it even then, as long as it doesn't get too crassly commercial about it (too late!) because who am I to rain on someone else's parade and in any case some small fraction will actually build and thus enrich both their own lives and everyone else's.
So here's the idea. TechShop existed by selling memberships to people who rarely came in, and by attracting grant money by promising to train people who rarely actually showed up. They attracted these members and those grants by giving frequent tours (with specific attention towards white elephants like the Water Jet), and by showing off member work in various venues. They also tried to attract and hold on to instructors and staff with actual skills by offering them free machine time.
So take that thought further. Spend money on your performing seals. Create a tier where the power users, the highly experienced users doing production work, are incentivized. Attract, in short, people who use the machines well and make the place look more lively and attractive.
Perhaps the people who are doing boring repetitive machining for their employer aren't the best choice here. Perhaps you seek out startups, and better yet, artists who you then sponsor officially, giving them top tier access in return for an understood quota of visibility and availability.
It's a thought, anyhow. Otherwise....I got nothing.
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