running this place is, to be frank, a money and time pit (although a very enjoyable one much of the time) for all involved.
Put up a single banner ad in a place that makes logical sense and hopefully it would at least defray some of the hosting costs? That's not asking a lot. Even if the ads are not profit-generating, we could rotate ads linking to companies with whom we have (and wish to maintain) a good working relationship? I wouldn't mind an ad or two if it made the site less of a money pit.
to be clear, we will never ever ever ever ever
ever have even a single banner ad or contract with any firm in such a way that would allow them to advertise on our site for a fee. geekhack.org is for geekhackers, by geekhackers, period.
I got to vote against powder coating as I never quite liked it. Unless done in a very clean setting you get defects and it chips easier than anodized, it increases the size of parts, dulls sharp corners, can't be used on most polymers etc
polymers you really just have to shoot or set in the color you want them to be in. etching and metallization is a huge pita and basically gives you two options: nickel and chrome, and the layer depth (because it's NOT actually anodization) changes dimensions there too, so let's forget polymers. we have access to quite a few keycap houses if we want the polymers to be caps. if we want other polymer things, they are going to have to be cast thermosets or FFM-able. for the thermosets, i did consider a geeckers pressure pot before binge got one, and one of the crucial parts of building the powdercoat setup would be building a good easily transportable and use-anywhere compressor that has a lot of flexibility in terms of pressure capability and tool usage. one doesn't have to follow that with a blast cabinet. one could follow it with another pressure pot. binge and i for example played around with the idea of shipping around degassed partially cured silicone materials for home casting, but i suspect this will be quite tricky, not to ship around silicones, that's easy, but to keep them degassed.
so, other than molding thermosets and FFM (which we have i will note), there are metals. you have two options when finishing metals. you can anodize or paint. wet paint is out of the question at our scale. we have very limited access to custom color anodizing, but at the moment not enough to actually get it done. basically there is some hardware somewhere that i know of, but it was basically purchased for mimic to color a single board and it's been literally sitting since then and is inaccessible to anyone associated with geeckers or even mimic. if we anodize clear, i believe i can get that done locally for reasonable prices. there is a shop in culver that has a couple big tanks, one of which i'm guessing is on most of the time and dye-free. one-off color anodizing though is hilariously out of the question unless everyone wants to individually put the investment in hazardous materials and gigantic tubs that mimic did.
so we're back to powdering. the advantage of powdering is that it's an exceedingly simple, inexpensive process. you simple blast, clean, ground, and then shoot your charged powder. we have a couple hundred in powders already that were purchased when treble's shop was able to powdercoat, so we have a fair amount of color flexibility already, and powder is, as they say, cheap as chips. yes, it can be difficult to get a single coat job perfect, but one nice thing about powder is that you can mix, layer and depending on your charge and material, get variable thickness coatings from microns to an order over that. you can also do weird exotic materials like ceramic powder that are partially fired in a standard powder oven and then fully fired by some natural process, either a kiln, or as is most common, the part is a car exhaust component and the exhaust gases actually finish the fire (it's pretty damn cool actually if you think about it).
A CNC mill would be nice but I think we'd need a larger high end machine for many of our purposes. I recon a small CNC laser cutter would be more useful as there are more people who design those types of cases, it is easier to maintain and even a rather small one will quite easily fit a larger keyboard. Frankly, it also allows us to put in cardboard and make storage boxes or whatever we want where I believe a CNC mill would have fewer purposes. We could also engrave legends on caps if we align a bunch of them or whatever.
i agree that the more i think about it, our _own_ mill is out of the question. the size of our parts is simply too large. and our desired designs too complex. we would be much better served by channeling all our jobs to a single shop and keeping the jobs coming. the problem we have had so far is distribution. like most hackerspaces, there is definitely a certain amount of talk without action around here, and then, a lot of stepping away when the bill comes due. if we want to get reliable machining done we can't do this. we need to have regular solid designs incoming and repeated orders in the shops preferred quantities.
as far as laser cutters are concerned, we simply have access to a ton, and could not afford anything more powerful than 1/8" acrylic at our budget. what's the point in buying a not-very-cool cutter when we have access to such a variety of good ones. we have metal cutters, we have plastic cutters, we have film cutters, all we need are designs and money and to keep the jobs coming to our contacts so that they can justify doing business with us. i simply don't see a need for us to buy a cutter. i see a need for us to make our current cutters happier with our business. one thing you may not know about btw damorgue, is that IMS, a local metal supplier, actually has a 6-axis laser that can be used for prototyping or production. however, be prepared to pony up. if you don't _absolutely need_ six axes, the_beast's cutter is much better for metal.
