I toured the Techshop in Pittsburgh, and took an industrial sewing class to see how their instruction was. I have my own workshop with a full-size lathe, mill,

I toured the Techshop in Pittsburgh, and took an industrial sewing class to see how their instruction was. I have my own workshop with a full-size lathe, mill, etc. The part of techshop that I thought was fundamentally flawed was the tooling provided. Yes, every section from woodworking to welding to machining had beautiful machines. But that's all they had. There is so much other support tooling and semi-consumables required, particularly, in metal work. You never just use a Vertical Mill to do a project. Where are your cutting tools? your myriad clamping solutions? Your various measurement gauges? That stuff really adds up, too, in price and in quantity. So when I toured Techshop I was thinking, "none of that is provided, so what? if I came, I'd have to wheel a 300lb dolly of parts and bits to enable me to use their beautiful machine?" And, no, I don't think the solution was for Techshop to provide that stuff. Just a simple dial indicator or calipers is going to get lost, broken, stolen in very short order. That's why I went away thinking, "what a shame -- a good idea in theory, but the reality of machine work makes this model of "man walks in off the street and builds a robot" pretty impractical, or at least not nearly easily as a casual daydream would suspect."