A Visit to Hack Oldham!

It's ages since I did a "I visited a cool hack/maker space" post so very pleased to say I got to go visit the fantastic Hack Oldham as part of my work with Indycube last week. A great visit where we swapped stories from the trenches of co-working, community development and making! Its a fantastic multifaceted space with lots of room and some stunning kit. Massive thanks to the mighty Andy ( @p0welly ) and Lisa ( @StudioG_Oldham ) and Keiran ( @Keiranwdigital ) for showing me round and taking time to talk! If you are around Oldham and need somewhere to work or make or both... get in there!

So above is the main space on the ground floor, bright and cheerful and really useful and reconfigurable. A great place to co-work and a decent sized event space. 

The geek bar and behind it storage for regular users of the space.

Still on the ground floor here is the permanent full time residents area 

That's a fab prize!

So.. moving into the labyrinth of basement rooms where the fab kit lurks its good to see good old rule zero in effect!

 Into one of the maker spaces, some fine woodwork tools to be seen. They had a great system where they had all tools on mounting boards with a uniform bolt spacing so that the tools could be reconfigured/moved and yet alow people to follow health and safety requirements for a minimum distance between tools. A great solution.

 LOVELY old Myford in good order. They had recently converted it to single phase... Great to see machining tools get some space in maker spaces.

 The electronics lab bench area with a good range of kit available and also a fab honesty box system for commonly used components below.

 Lasers and vinyl cutters.. classic tools for maker/hackspaces!

More bits and bobs... 

 I think they knew about my vice addiction! Great set of record vices here!

So there we go.. a fantastic visit, hopefully I'll get to work with them in the future and get to go back and pester them again.. better not upset them though... they have Daleks!