The assortment of 3D printers and other inventions involving a meld of human and electronic brains gave the weekend’s sixth annual Vancouver Mini Maker Faire its usual futuristic flavour. For balance, there was the “stitch and bitch” corner with loomers and seamstresses along with the delightfully antiquated-themed Times Past booth, which featured an adorably cartoonish robotic barking dog named M.U.T. (Mechanical Universal Tracker) created by the husband-wife team of Christina Carr and Martin Hunger who met at a Doctor Who convention in ’87.
At yet another makers table, worklamps provided light in the otherwise dim PNE Forum where children and adults hunched over a small circuit board with soldering gun in hand.
The instructions led to the completion of a blinking button featuring the Vancouver Hack Space logo in a type font familiar to those who lived in the olden days of VHS tapes.
The space itself is on Cook Street and is advertised on its website as “the community garage for a community without garages.” Still, an improvement over its first location in 2008 off Hastings Street where it was a back-alley entrance and members were let inside by using a key dropped down on a string from the window.
The collective has no hierarchy beyond a two-tiered membership system of keyholders and regular members. Being a keyholder is as straightforward as it sounds — the space can be used at any time. It’s especially handy if your name happens to be Jade Andersen and you need to keep a 2002 Volkswagen Jetta alive.
“I’ve brought my car into Hack Space — there’s one loading bay for the entire building so I always do it late at night,” said Andersen. “I’ve got to fix these holes in the radiator, I’ve got to figure out what’s wrong with my transmission. I can say, ‘You guys! My car’s messed up!’… It’s nice to have people around who love tinkering and taking things apart. We don’t necessarily know what we’re doing but we’re all really cool about exploring and figuring things out. We’re good at figuring things out.”
Besides fixing a couple of radiator holes, members have built remote-controlled helicopters, a vintage arcade game cabinet that runs 100 vintage games, a drawing robot and plans are in the works for a “near-space balloon.”
The list of Andersen’s creations is a glimpse into the creative and brilliant spark of her brain; it comes as no surprise she’s a mechatronic engineering student at BCIT as of this fall. Some of those items include: bunkbeds in the shape of a treehouse, a light-therapy alarm clock and a 3D printer. It’s important to note the word “hacking” in this world is defined by tinkering, exploring and reconfiguring existing systems so they work in different ways than intended. Members have a wide range of interests, from crafting and machining to electronic music and robotics. So don’t ask VHS members to hack into your girlfriend’s email account.
“Hack Space appeals to people like me. I’m a broke university student so once a year I buy myself a new tool. I’ll save up and by myself a really fantastic miter saw or something like that, but I can’t afford the kind of tools that I like to use so it’s nice to go to a space where they’re not expensive to use,” Andersen said. “A lot of people have good ideas, and they would like to make something. The limitation is not their skills, the limitation is the fact they don’t have the tools so they can’t go and develop the skills in the first place. We’re all around to help, we’re about skill-sharing, too.”
Tools available at VHS include laser cutters, 3D printers, sewing machines, silk-screening supplies, bandsaws and grinders. There is even a button-maker, which one of VHS’s members, a 13-year-old girl, made good use of as she turned her artwork into buttons that she then sells to her schoolmates.
“It’s unlimited because we don’t let ourselves have barriers,” said Andersen. “If there’s a will, there’s a way.”
VHS hosts an open house Tuesday evenings. Find out more at hackspace.ca.
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