Walk into the squat brick building in a gritty patch of central Denver, and your first thought might be: Do these folks make and sell noise for a living?
There is a cacophony of shrieks, howls and pounding, courtesy of an array of power tools, industrial lathes and old-fashioned ball-peen hammers. Amid the lulls, you can hear the tap-tap-tap of computer keyboards.
Welcome to Club Workshop, a giant toy box and communal gathering place for people united by one need: to tinker and build.
“A lot of people here consider themselves ‘makers,’ ” says owner Stephen Garran, who opened the business in 2008. “They build things just because they can. We get artists, hackers, crafts people, tradesmen and geeks of all sorts. The overriding desire is, ‘I’d like to build my own ideas.’ “
Club Workshop occupies a 16,000-square-foot space at 999 Vallejo St. in the heart of a warren of industrial buildings. There is a wood shop, a metalworking room, welding equipment, an auto bay, plus upstairs rooms dedicated to sophisticated textile printers, etching machines and a robotics workshop. The latter is popular with high-school science teams.
The facility offers a novel arrangement for do-it-yourselfers: Access, for a fee, to shop machinery too expensive or space-consuming for the average homeowner. The building has Wi-Fi and personal computers. Membership fees are tiered. One year costs $89 a month. It’s $109 a month for six months, $129 a month for three. Or if you have a one-off project, you can buy a 21-hour punch card for $289.
A young Henry Ford would have turned cartwheels.
We have always been a nation of tinkerers and innovators, driven by a mix of necessity, ingenuity and plain curiosity. Even a short list of Americans who hit the workbench or laboratory asking “What if?” is impressive: Thomas Alva Edison, George Washington Carver, the Wright brothers, Bill Gates.
This partly explains why Steven Gentner sat at a Club Workshop table on Thursday evening, using a laptop to guide a miniature camera in front of him. The camera was mounted on a gimbal, rigged to bob and weave at Gentner’s remote command.
The camera’s focus: a 4-inch-tall Mr. Bill doll from the old “Saturday Night Live” skits. On Gentner’s laptop, only Mr. Bill’s red shirt showed up onscreen.
“I’m using this to isolate the shade of red,” says Gentner, founder of Robo Realm, a Denver company that develops computer vision, image analysis and robotic vision systems. “One application is that you could use this to identify blood contaminants in eggs.”
Who knew?
Garran, a former IT consultant, dreamed up the shop three years ago. He was futilely searching for a facility where he could fabricate a new part for his wife’s 1967 Maserati Quattroporte sedan.
Why wasn’t there a place where people involved in various crafts could meet, work and swap info, even get some instruction? A year later, Garran opened the shop. His goal: Enroll 250-300 people.
The concept is simple. Members come in, grab a cart and load it with the requisite tools kept in an array of storage bins. Need a wood chisel? You can choose from two dozen.
Many of the heavier machines feature CNC applications. CNC is an acronym for computerized numerical control. Users can program complex directions into the machine’s keyboard, allowing routers and lathes to perform work that exceeds the operator’s own hand-turning skills.
Some tools sound straight out of science fiction. Plasma cutters have been around a few years, but the notion of running an electric current through an inert gas to create a hyper-hot torch — as in 45,000 degrees — astounds even Garran. “It’s ridiculously hot,” he says. “It cuts metal like nobody’s business.”
Safety is pushed, starting with mandatory safety glasses and earplugs in some areas. A few machines require certification. Cautionary signs abound.
Oh, and no open-toed shoes. “In Colorado, that’s probably the hardest one to enforce,” says Garran, who as a native Australian can sympathize with the casual ethos.
Some members perform tasks as basic as mounting snow tires and winterizing their vehicles. Others engage in more arcane pursuits.
“We have lots of inventors here, so we ask people to respect each others privacy and not be too inquisitive about what someone’s working on,” Garran says.
Andrew Benson is a typical member. He builds electric guitars. The two he is working on resemble stylized battle axes, something you might see in “The Lord of the Rings.”
Thing is, Benson doesn’t play the instrument. He just likes to create, and plans to parlay his experience into a free download to distribute online. “Building a guitar is sometimes more frustrating than satisfying,” he says. “I’m still trying to iron out problems. But it’s getting more fun.”
Sebastian Waszak is building a race car, which he keeps under a tarp in the auto bay. But a recent evening found him working on a friend’s Audi, which was overheating.
“My ultimate playhouse would be to own a shop with friends,” says Waszak, a professional mechanic. “But no one wanted to do that. Then I found this. It’s just a great place to play with cool toys.”
This pleases Garran.
“The great thing is bringing all the elements of the ‘builder’ set together,” Garran says. “You get incredibly experienced people together with people just getting started. People share their skills.
“As we grow, it’s developing into a real community,” he says. “I love the fact that I can help people build things. The creativity of some of our members just amazes me.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
