So Make It: Southampton Makerspace New Location!

Southampton Makerspace moved!  We grew, our old unit K6 on Liner’s Industrial Estate got too pokey:

unit_k6_in_the_dark
Dark, dingy and cramped. It was home for a while.

So we looked around.  We took over unit F!  This latest unit on the same estate became vacant at the beginning of 2015, so we were kindly allowed in early by our awesome landlord to clean and repaint.

Unit_F_Viewing
New unit it 1200 sqft and needs a panoramic camera to take it all in!

It was a LOT of hard work, especially since we have a 2.4m high ceiling, so we needed to borrow a gantry just to repair and paint the ceiling and reach the top of the walls.

gantry
Our awesome landlord has then most useful things in his cupboards – like a gantry some we could paint the ceiling!

So there we have it, we now have 1200 sqft, split into 1/3 and 2/3 chunks, the smaller is a workshop kitted out with custom designed benches and power tools, with an insulated wooden partition wall (kindly sponsored by Embecosm) and door to keep all the noise and dust in 🙂

Unit_F_Wall_Construction
Building the dirty zone clean zone partition

There’s still lots to do, specifically adding more power outlets (you simply can’t have too many sockets) network infrastructure and better lighting in the workshop but progress has been pretty good so far. (here’s a dodgy webcam shot from one of our Tuesday night openings…)

SMI_10Mar15
aaaand relax.

So Make It is growing so fast in membership and activities that I expect we’ll be looking for our own warehouse in the not-so-distant future!  Here’s hoping.

Loads of pictures of can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/somakeitpics/pool/

Our website is http://www.somakeit.org.uk

Our youtube channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKCovZIuD5iL-TdbuFiOBw

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