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Sounds like you're looking for something like TechShop - http://techshop.ws/

Because if you call it workshop upper middle class guys will think it's a place where dirty. low-class, lowlifes work with old techniques like welders

Welding is a good way to make stuff, and even an upper middle class guy should be able to learn it. The equipment for MIG welding is simple and cheap. Any decent workerspace/makeshop should have one. You also want a CNC vertical mill, and lathe, even if it is just a table top, like a Sherline. If you have a Techshop nearby, you should partner with them. If there is a Techshop a day's drive away, you should pay them a visit. You will learn a lot. You might talk to them about opening a branch in your town. Also, talk to your insurance company, and make sure what you are planning is allowed under your existing policy.

I suggest you consider a laser cutter.

I second this. At my local Techshop the laser cutter is always busy. They are really fun to use, and easy to learn. You can use them cut or engrave. They work with most plastics, wood, leather, cloth, and even chocolate. Several people can multitask on one machine, with several editing and adjusting their designs while another is lasing. Tip: If you want to engrave a photo of your honey onto a chocolate bar, refrigerate the chocolate for an hour or so first, and use a bit-flipped (negative) image.

You can get a good one for $10 to $15k

Since you only need it for a few weeks in the summer, you could rent or borrow one from a local engraver or techshop.

What I would like to see is integration of online learning with things like this Techshop. I would love a 'Bioshop' which contains lots of medical/biological lab tools allowing people to learn lecture material online, and do lab work after of course passing some safety courses. The problem of course, is that such a thing is fairly niche compared to Techshop, but I can dream.

I've always thought a great business would be a complete machine shop and wood working shop, along with a small supplies type place.

in other words "techshop"

http://techshop.ws/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechShop

The biggest problem is most likely material and distance. Can I haul around my material including the finished project easily? And can you find a place that is centrally located yet has good enough roads to get there in less than an hour of drivetime?

It's terrible for your business reputation to be known to be good with tools. The kid was right from a career standpoint.

Also, drilling a deep hole in an office wall is non-trivial. Even assuming that the building owner allows it (which, in commercial leases, they usually do) you don't know what's behind the wall without checking. There are probably cables, pipes, and ducts in there. Did you use an energized wire detector? A stud finder? Check the building blueprints? It's probably not drywall over wooden 2x4s, either. Commercial construction is different, because the fireproofing requirements are higher. It could be a metal wall, drywall over concrete, drywall on metal studs, plaster over lath, plaster over brick, or other less-common options, including asbestos insulation. For most of those, a drywall anchor is the wrong fastener.

For something like a coat hook, adhesive hooks are more appropriate. 3M has some good ones.

If you want your employees to have shop class, buy them a TechShop membership.

TechShop

Along with high school shop classes, I want one of THESE in every town.

http://techshop.ws/

If there was one close enough (North of Seattle) I'd be there daily.

Techshop is a shared-equipment workspace in Menlo Park CA, with a few other branches (they're opening in San Francisco this summer.) I was there welding a couple of weeks ago, and ran into a friend of mine who was doing a project in the laser cutter room, and the people working on the other laser cutter were Knuth and his wife. (I refrained from walking over and saying "Hi, I'm Joe Fanboi, I used your books 30 years ago!".) Techshop has laser cutters, embroidering machines, 3D printers, and plasma cutters, and here's Knuth's latest project supporting them. I wonder if he's got any plans for controlling CNC milling machines and routers?

I would be interested in helping. As in, I won't just cheer you on on the internet, I might pitch in real money.

I am not so interested in a museum, or at least not just a museum -- some sort of museum seems appropriate for the place. I would be more interested in something like a "Hacker Space" with labs and workshops and possibly living arrangements, but on a bigger scale than hacker houses; more like a self-run graduate or research institute. I would like to be able to use the facilities like a Tech Shop ( http://techshop.ws/ ) if I lived close enough, pay a fee to be able send a design in to be made on a rapid protyping machine if we go that router, add myself to a waiting list to be able to live there a semester and take / teach classes, etc.

The structure should be some sort of corporation, with "members" buying shares, and each share should be priced high enough to keep the numbers manageable and low enough that not very many people would be economically excluded -- I would suggest 500 or 1000 dollars. Enough shares should be sold to fund what we want to do with a margin, and then no more; subsequent members would buy out an existing member's spot.

Decisions would have to be done democraticly via a system such as Debian uses or using something like DeliberativeAssembly.com . Of course officiers and a board would carry out actual immediate tasks, and long term decisions would be voted on at large, and the officiers and board be regularly elected, etc.

This particular piece of property might not be on the market by the time something was organized, but there are other places. If we make up a list of appropriate parameters -- size of space, with X miles of an airport, in a town with an Amtrak stop, etc, I am sure some structurly sound but unused factory building can be found somewhere away from the coasts for much less than 1.6 million.

I've taken a couple of welding courses over at Techshop, and there's a range of welding goggle technology out there. Electric-arc welding (MIG, TIG, old-style stick, etc.) needs really dark goggles, and photo-sensitive welding goggles are available and really cool. They're adjustable-strength, and I think the technology is LCDs driven by a photocell, as opposed to a purely chemical mechanism like sunglasses. (For gas torch welding, the glasses don't need to be as strong, and the standard "adjustable" technology is just flip-up green lenses.) Unfortunately, the automatic ones cost about $200, as opposed to non-adjustable welding helmets that are usually under $100 or torch-welding goggles that are priced like sunglasses.

If this technology is dark enough for welding, ,and not too expensive it's fast enough to be effective.

Yeah, I know you said /humor here, but I'm currently facing that situation :-) I've been at my company long enough to officially be "retired" when they lay me off this month, though I'd expected to need to work at least another decade before I could actually retire. My defined-benefit pension got replaced with a cash-balance "equivalent" some years ago, which looked a lot better when I could make 10% interest than now when I'll be lucky to get 2% on it and my 401K. At least I get my medical covered, which is a good thing if the next job I find doesn't provide that.

Meanwhile, I'll get to practice welding at Techshop, and try to pick up on the programming that I've ignored the last few years (I've been messing with routers instead), and go cover my home PC with a pile of virtual machines. Pretty soon I should be able to start actually writing some FOSS instead of just using it - it's been too long...

For those of you who have no idea how real, physical stuff is made, there's an entire industry of small "job shops" that will take your design and make a part for you. If you're anywhere near a industrial city, there's probably one in your neighborhood. Most will use machine tools, but ones with stereolithography machines aren't that rare.

If you're in Silicon Valley and want to use a stereolithography machine, check out TechShop, which has one of the better ones. It won't be busy when you visit.

The site seems slashdotted already. Google's cache should have a copy of their 3D printer, laser etcher, and other services for building (nearly) anything that you can imagine.

This is the most innovative thing to hit Silicon Valley in years. It really should've been covered by Slashdot long ago.

The advantage the Techshop has over mail-in is that you can get advice on how to create your prototype. The costs for a 3D print job can vary greatly depending on how you do it. Just the orientation alone can either save you or cost you quite a bit. So that's why I prefer "hands on". Now, if I really knew what I was doing, or I didn't have a TechShop nearby, then I'd probably do a mail-order service.

As far as apps goes, you can pull down one of the Google apps (whose name I've forgotten at the moment) and use that.

Oh - and the guy who founded the TechShop used to work with Mythbusters in creating their gadgets. I hear they even showed up on opening day.

I have no connecting with the Techshop other than has a happy and frequent customer.

I recommend Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers by Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan. The title of the book itself doesn't sound all that appealing, but this is the book you want. It will teach you all the little tricks that seasoned practitioners know, but that most books won't even tell you about. Other guides I have found useful are the old Radio Shack notebooks. I'm not sure how they're called, or where you'd get them legally. I haven't seen them at Radio Shack and I do not know if they're still in print.

And last, I have to plug this TechShop establishment since they offer classes at very reasonable rates and they were kind enough to host our Ruby Hackfest in their awesome space last month.

I recommend Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers by Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan. The title of the book itself doesn't sound all that appealing, but this is the book you want. It will teach you all the little tricks that seasoned practitioners know, but that most books won't even tell you about. Other guides I have found useful are the old Radio Shack notebooks. I'm not sure how they're called, or where you'd get them legally. I haven't seen them at Radio Shack and I do not know if they're still in print.

And last, I have to plug this TechShop establishment since they offer classes at very reasonable rates and they were kind enough to host our Ruby Hackfest in their awesome space last month.

I remember reading about someone else setting up something similar in Silicon Valley.

Stereolithography machines aren't magic. They're a useful way of making plastic shapes in small quantities, expensively. But that's about it. Much of the same work can be done with a CNC milling machine. Roland makes some nice little desktop CNC mills. They also make 3D "scanners" which work by touch, carefully servoing a tiny stylus with a phonograph pickup like device over the surface of a 3D object. So you can copy existing objects.

All this stuff works fine, but it's a niche market. It's mostly used by people designing small, handheld devices.

Making plastic parts by injection molding, vacuum forming, or hot stamping is incredibly cheap and fast compared to building them up with a stereolithography machine. Making, say, a keyboard key in an injection molding press costs maybe a penny. Making one in a stereolithography machine will cost about $40. Yes, you can make one-offs, but not cheaply.

Realize that most manufactured goods (with the notable exception of wood products) are made by some kind of moulding process involving a master - stamping, casting, injection moulding, blowing and vacuum forming, etc. That's also true of photolithography, used for ICs and circuit boards. Building up something in layers or carving it out of a solid block costs orders of magnitude more.

If you want to use a stereolithography machines, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop. They have one of the better ones, plus workstations with the necessary design software. It's not used much. Their laser cutter, which cuts flat sheets, gets much more use.

The ceiling wouldn't be that hard to do. Use a CNC router to mill a clay mould, then vacuum-form plastic sheet over it. TechShop in Silicon Valley has all the gear for that, and there are shops that do large-area vacuum forming. Up to 6' x 11' vacuum forming of single pieces is commercially available.

Much of the "future" that comes from Hollywood is made by vacuum forming. It's cheap.

There's much misplaced enthusiasm for stereolithography machines. They're useful and fun, but not a panacea. It's inherently a slow process, and far more expensive than injection moulding if you're making many copies. The amateur stereolithography machine from this latest Popular Mechanics article is neither novel nor particularly good; I've seen similar machines before. Pushing some viscous liquid out of a syringe isn't one of the better approaches.

If you want to try a stereolithography machine, and you're in the SF Bay Area, there's one available at TechShop in Menlo Park. Rates are very reasonable if you join TechShop. That machine makes hard ABS plastic objects with smooth surfaces, tough enough to be used as working parts. The machine probably won't be in use.

This has become a standard way to make prototypes of product designs, but it's not a production technology.

Maybe it's trite or overcommercialized, but a club in the vein of "Make" might be doable. People make interesting projects with things available around the home, that might be novel or practical, but usually fun.

TechShop is an effort to do exactly that. They're already in Menlo Park and I went to a presentation in Renton, WA about their expansion into the Seattle area.

Sorry, that's TechShop. Argh, .ws domains!