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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to throw an idea to those who know better than I do.

Ever since I started living on my own I've lived in apartments, none of which had a backyard (one of them had a parking lot). None of my friends owns a house either. I'm the perfect customer for this and I'd love to do my own projects (two of which require a lathe!) but I simply don't have the space.

Is this just me? Or is the disappearance of the hobby garage a real phenomenon? A 3D printer is fairly limited in what it allows, but it also doesn't throw sawdust in the center of my living room.

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This is generally what a makerspace is for. I don’t know what the (inter)national landscape is like for them, but I have a small 8’x8’ studio space at the makerspace in my city, which also has a full wood shop, metal shop, and tons of rapid prototyping tools (3d printers, vinyl cutter, etc). I live in a 1BR apartment downtown and the makerspace is in an industrial district that is a 5-minute bike ride away, and it’s basically my “garage”, just shared with 30 other studios and probably 200 non-studio members who come and go.

The US is kind of "collapsing" in third spaces both public and private, but especially public due to funding cuts.

That is the meme, but there are plenty of third spaces. They have changed, and will likely continue to change, but people who live in the US find them.

This is precisely what makerspaces are for.

There are many operating models. Some are attached to another organization (a library, a university), some are commercial (RIP Techshop), some are completely DIY and member-run. Any given city might have a handful of different ones, but you'll have to dig around and visit a few to see what you vibe with.

Caveat, it's very easy to get focused on the ooh-shiny tools, and forget to pay attention to the community energy and expectations. Some of the more professional spaces, you just pay for what you want, and staff takes care of the rest. At the other end of the scale, the fully-DIY places are very much a case of "you get out of it what you put into it", and may offer cheaper memberships but expect a lot more involvement.

Visit as many as you can.

> forget to pay attention to the community energy and expectations

My problem is that I just...don't care about the community that much, and ended up just buying the tools I needed/outsourcing as needed. Though travel time/cost made it really uncompetitive (I don't drive, and neither of the large makerspaces in my city bothered to take transit accessibility into account...sigh). Even if I did drive, to me the commute time is just time better spent actually working on project du jour. All of that, plus the rise of sites like JLC(PCB|3DP) and sendcutsend where I can just get the part I want without any hassle really killed the value proposition for me.

I still like the idea of makerspaces, but it feels to me that the community has become the product. Which is all well and good, but if you don't particularly value that part, cheap tools + online fabrication services are already a tough comparison, and that's before burning a couple of hours on transit, before I've even touched a tool, well, the practical case completely falls apart for me.

> is the disappearance of the hobby garage a real phenomenon

Not in the US. The suburbs are still growing, and all of them feature large garages. It might not fit your lifestyle though, and so you don't see it.

There are plenty of people who make very complex models in tiny apartments. With some skill you can do a lot in a small space. A few people do that.

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