Yesterday a few hardy makers gathered to build a stand for our anvil. We bolted 4x4's together and strapped the anvil to the top. We will have a blacksmithing class soon.

We meet every other Wednesday at 6 pm to talk about projects and work on stuff. You can contact us at info@colamakerspace.com or just show up! Come to the Sumter St. side of the building and go to the door inside the fence and under the old drive through canopy. We have a doorbell mounted on the door. 
Other stuff:
A bottle opener blacksmithing class will be held in a month or so. We need to build a platform for the anvil.
We plan to buy a jointer for woodworking.
Many other plans in the works!
We are always interested in new members!

KiCAD is a free utility for designing printed circuit boards. We got an intro to it from one of our members.

We bought a forge, anvil, and hand tools to do blacksmithing. We'll do a bottle opener event soon, then try some knife making.
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One of our member (same guy form previous post) made a shelf  for his radios for his boat:

One of our members volunteers on the tall ship Spirit of South Carolina
http://spiritofsouthcarolina.blogspot.com/
​He remade a block that had become rotted. The wood is cypress from Mann Tools.
The ship and the old block:

Making the new block:

We cranked up the furnace last night and made some easter eggs out of molten aluminum!

We had some progress on Sunday. We removed the rest of the stuff from the new room, painted in primer one wall and rigged up some stuff for the gate.

Not much happened during this meeting. We just tinkered around with different types of paint we could paint our new room in.

It's been a while since last update because I was too lazy to take minutes. However, I managed to write up notes from yesterday's meeting, so here they are.

New room!
The good news: we've got a new room! It's that room across the hall from metal shop, the one full of chairs.
The bad news: we need to clean it up to use it.

Fence/Gate
We did not make any progress on the gate because it was too dark. Need to tackle this one some time on weekend.

Lights outside of the door
We looked into installing lights outside of door at the parking lot. Existing fixture appears to not be working at all. We are probably going to rig up our own light system there.

Dust collector
Made some progress with this one. Ordered 4" and 2" hoses and clamps. The way we planned it so far is if you need to to use a tool you take that tool out and place it at the middle of the room on a table, connect hoses and start working. Then put the tool back. Package should arrive this Saturday, 13th. The next thing is to design adapters to various tools. Mostly it is going to be adapters from 2" to whatever diameter of the tool's dust collecting hole is, but we could get creative and design some adapter that would allow us to use 2 tools at once, or something like that.

Miscellaneous
We ordered a pack of 6 measuring tapes, cause you can never have enough of these.

Alex