UptownMaker

Mr. Jalopy's famous side one, track one of the Maker's Bill of Rights is all well and good, but more basically, if you can't FIND it, you don't own it. Owning an object has a cost, however minor, associated with it.  You'll have to move it if you change residences, you have to keep your kid/cat/ferret/sugar glider away from things you don't want smashed/pissed on/drug under your couch/scent marked by a weird oily forehead gland, and clutter (IMO) occupies mental real estate we can usually ill-afford to waste.  If you're going to pay these costs, you should take care to keep your gear well organized so these costs aren't wasted when it comes time to use something. As a hackerspace-going maker, I find myself with an additional constraint- if I want to work on a project at the shop, I need to either bring what I need (tools and materials both) or be darn sure I know what and where stuff at the shop is.  My solution is a robust, scalable, compact group ...

Okay, hardcore nerdery here.  Sorry to the non-believers in the audience, but... 5.  SMT technology for hobbyists. Some will argue the point, looking back with nostalgia at the days when every IC was available in through-hole and sockets abounded, but I for one welcome our minuscule highly integrated overlords. Ten years ago, when I bought my first parts from Digi-key, it was inconceivable to me that SMT parts could be usable on an at-home basis.  Now, the proliferation of adapters (such as Capital Advanced Technologies' excellent "Surfboard" series ), cheap hot-air and fine-point rework stations , excellent reflow tutorials , and extremely low-cost low quantity PCB fabrication services (like BatchPCB and the DorkbotPDX group buy ), it's now completely and totally reasonable for a hobbyist to use SMT parts to realize extremely advanced designs in surprisingly small amounts of space. All that's really needed is the right attitude.

I keep falling behind, but I'll not be more than one day back, dammit! Number 6- A mini-lathe. One of the most common things I use a lathe for is the drilling of a concentric hole (or reaming one out) in a circular object (gears and wheels, for instance). I don't need a super-accurate means to reduce a diameter or things like that, just a way to put a hole in the exact center of a gear when I'm trying to mate it to a particular shaft (of a potentiometer, or encoder, or what have you). I guess "lathe" is the wrong term, but it's the best I have. Number 7- RepscRap. The RepRap, of course, is the open-source self-replicating 3d part printer. The RepscRap is an extension to that, a device which allows the reclamation of plastic material of appropriate composition by shredding it, melting it, and extruding it as a stick or rod the can be re-used in a RepRap. The material would be recaptured from junked electronics, pop bottles, or whatever uniform source of a...