Hi Folks,
Recently, I've been incredibly humbled by the outpouring of donations into the geekhackers trust fund. Although I am basically liable for Geekhackers the company (hereby, geeckers), as the community pledges into it, they are owning more and more of it in spirit.
I've been trying to figure out what I can do to best serve the community. Inventory is a difficult problem, although I will be expanding my inventory and getting the webstore up, I have to be cautious with that, because, for example, I have a couple thousand in lubricant and ps2 adapter inventory already that is moving pretty slowly. I like having it here so that people can get these things on demand for very reasonable prices (I always try to beat every known price on my inventory).
However, I feel that tooling is a much better way to serve the community. Currently, the major piece of tooling the geeckers owns (that is still very much in the red and basically represents a huge amount of my equity in the company) is the makerbot rep2x. It's a bit problematic, in that the duty cycle I have been running at it has broken almost every piece in the machine at least once, but the result of this is that makerbot, inc is quite aware that we exist and that i serve the community with one of their (quite cool, actually) units. they have helped quite a bit in providing comped parts where they can and keeping my breakage costs down. my current project with the makerbot is to make easy dispensing and rolling spools for the kester 44 i have in my stockroom but not apportioned into sellable units yet.
hence, ideally what i'd like to do is help the community by purchasing one more piece of tooling that is appropriate for the community and can be heavily used (without breaking, has high demand, etc.).
Option a) Purchase a sherline 5400 series CNC-ready mill and design a control system for it. The cost of this will be in the range of 1500$. These mills are extremely high precision, with some care (basically they need to be weighed down). however, they only handle small parts. think 40-65% keyboard cases, and I have no experience with CAM and gcode compilation yet in the subtractive realm. even if i were to purchase the unit tomorrow, it would be months before this service were online.
Option b) Custom powdercoating services. I have been looking into what i can do powdercoating-wise in my apartment. unfortunately we recently lost our custom powdercoater, so i could attack that hole in our tooling availability. i have found benchtop self-contained units that will allow me to bead blast in my apartment; i already have the solvents needed and a solvent setup to do that part of prep. the hopper-based cabinet would allow me powdercoat up to 80% keyboard cases with the colors that we purchased for our last powdercoater. basically i would bead blast in the cabinet, then snake a ground wire in, clean out the cabinet, and then snake the powdercoat gun in and powder, then bake using an industrial quarter-size convection oven. total cost of this, as I have determined so far (although with my inexperience this may be off) is about 300-400 for a compressor i can run in my apartment, 700 for the cabinet, 700 for the powder gun system, and 600 for the oven, for an estimated equipment cost of about 2000$. I would need to pull a donation drive to fund much of this, as geeckers cash flow is not high enough yet to pay for this. however, the first job i run will be the gh edition panavises. i have 20 of these at the moment, but i am going to attempt to double or triply my stock of them in the very near future (ie, today).
