Guild of Makers

March 25, 2019

The Guild of Makers is a membership organisation. It exists to encourage Makers to support, encourage and help each other.

Definition of a Maker for the purposes of this Guild:
A practical person who takes pride in creating physical items using their imagination and skills.

The Guild of Makers was started just over a year ago back in 2018 and had their first annual conference in March last year. I joined just before that and hence became one of the founder members.

Unfortunately, I missed the first conference as I’d already booked tickets to Makers Central and could not justify the time/cost for both events. So I decided to switch this year and visit the Guild of Makers Conference instead. But I did re-use my badge from the previous year.

I set off from Euston at 7:13 but due to engineering works and general incompetence by the train company the journey took nearly 4 hours. However, I did get to travel part of the way with @pinski1 and @konichiwakitty as they also got stuck at Northampton.

By the time we arrived, we’d missed 3 of the talks but were in time for the tea break and followed by talks by Hanna Varga – @AshleafLondon , Rachel Wong – @konichiwakitty and Seb Lee-Delisle – @Seb_ly

I’d missed Alfred and Sue’s talk on impostor syndrome and building things for the Western Approaches museum. But got to meet up with them at the swap table. “Hey Andy, Big Fan” says Alfred. “Thanks” I timidly responded. Alfred gestures to the box at the corner of the table containing a selection of extractor fans.

After lunch we had a tour of AutoDesk’s advanced manufacturing facility where they use welders strapped to 3D printers, 3D printers strapped to robots and really expensive materials strapped to really expensive milling machines. A really enthusiastic tour guide explain how they like to get everyone from the company into their makers lab so they understand making as well as software.

The tour was followed by a show and tell, so I showed off Babbages Baggage, a giant key, The Kuriologist’s Skull, and The Knight from the Dragon Detector. This was also the time to meet with the other makers and I met so many fantastic makers from all sorts of fields and specialisations.

In the afternoon we made micro peg based automata in a workshop run by Rob Ives. I spotted afterwards that I had glued my legs on in the wrong place so I fixed that at home.

After a wrap up session and a raffle to raise money for Remap, we headed home with our goody bags, thankfully the train did not take so long on the way back.

Over the weekend the family tried out the Design Spark VR Headset and we got started on building a Flexiphant paper automata. I also build a mount for the extractor fan.

By Andy from Workshopshed Add Comment

  Posted in: Exhibition