...the road to success!

Something happened in the Hackspace on a Monday craft night early in April which made me feel really good about Nottingham Hackspace. It was the making of a bird box. Though the design was somewhat rustic and the finishing result (though fabulous) remains to be seen if it's practical, the journey to completion for the Hacker who made it is worthy of a brief mention somewhere.

One of the founders of hackspace and my fellow podcaster @KateMonkey, the RingMaster of craft night decided she was going to make a "goddamn birdhouse" out of roofing shingles and nothing was going to stop her, except the self imposed restriction on using "power tools" as she's promised her husband she wouldn't.

Taking a shingle and firmly clamping it upright, grabbing a handy looking saw, a gold marker pen to make the cut lines and a bunch of enthusiasm, it didn't take Kate long to realise that it might be time to try the band saw.

10 minutes later with a pile of shingles cut to size, a hammer and a fist full of nails, Kate chose the flimsiest trestle table to start hammering these boards together. Politely fending off offers of help, advise about the wobbly table and flatly refusing to use the air-powered nail gun we left her too it.

Moments later Kate appears at the proper work benches hammer in hand. At this point we'd set up the nail gun and offered to show Kate how it worked...

One of the greatest things about Hackspaces is that they put new tools into the hands of creative people to the extent of providing experience and encouragement that creativ

e people may dismiss in different environments. From thinking such tools are potentially "dangerous" in her hands, Kate went full circle (in my opinion) seeing that on the contrary using the wrong tools and environment for a task could prove equally dangerous. Had Kate tried to hammer the birdhouse together on the trestle or sawn the wood clamped vertically in the bench vice the difficulty and tedium of the task not to mention the potential for harm would have been enough to leave the birdhouse a pipedream... at least it would have been unlikely to finish up as the bird mansion (cream coloured, glitter covered, pink writing) it became.

Kate recently posted in our Google group that she'll be running a planter making workshop. Had she not made a successful stab at the bird box with the sort of environment and tools that

the Hackspace can provide would this have been likely? The birdhouse, band saw and nail gun are fairly simple projects and tools. Take this learning up a level to working with

autoCAD, CNC and laser cutting for example, or the lathe and welding equipment we can see that individual's creativity and experience can be grown in a Hackspace with the right level of encouragement and more importantly empowerment.

If there is a lesson in this tail it should be that we should all challenge ourselves to make ourselves a goddamn birdhouse!