Stanford's Mechanical Engineering department's Product Realization Laboratory

If you are in Los Angeles, there are several affordable machine shops here. I'll be taking the Venice Machine Shop class starting next Monday (http://venicemachine.com/). For only $55, you get 6 hours of machine shop access for 3 months! El Camino College has a more modern machine shop with all sorts of cool prototyping machines but the classes are on weekday mornings (http://southbaymachine.com/). Machine shops in other parts of our fair & sprawling region are listed here: http://venicemachine.com/expandedinfo/machineshopclasses.htm

There are also Fab Labs around the world: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/labs/

“Engineers and designers are much more powerful if they have built things."