The long-awaited announcement is here. Hive76 has found a new hom
e in Philadelphia. After several weeks of searching and negotiating, we’ve managed to make a deal and sign a lease with our new home, Bok. We’re looking forward to moving in and announcing the first Open House in our new home. Look forward to new projects, new classes, and new events.
Time for a long overdue update on the building situation. As many of our regular open house visitors have noticed, 915 Spring Garden, the building where Hive76 has set up shop since its inception in 2009, has been shut down due to code violations after a small fire in another artist’s studio. It is an ongoing issue with the city and owners of the building to resolve, but meanwhile we have no access to the building, our space, or our tools, so open house is postponed.
In the meantime, Hive76 members have been working on new projects in our garages and home workshops, and are going to public events to stay involved in the community, such as PumpCon this weekend. Stay tuned to our mailing list, along with our IRC Channel, #hive76 on irc.freenode.net, where we will make announcements of these events. We encourage everyone to reach out via e-mail and in person at any events we’re attending.
Hive76 is currently working with the realty company to find out when the building can re-open. We’re also investigating other options, such as moving Hive76 to a new location within Philadelphia. Either way, we’ll try to keep you informed about Philadelphia’s Premiere Hackerspace.
FOSSCON is right around the corner, and Hive76 is gearing up for another run. Our very own Jordan Miller is presenting the keynote talk on building Open Source Infrastructures for Science. We’ll be in our own room again this year showing off our latest gadgets and creations, our tools and our know-how.You can expect to see a 3D printer in action, Circuit Bending, Piezo madness, Battlebots and more. We’ll be there August 10th, 9AM-5:30PM.
Consider registering and getting a FOSSCON T-Shirt and helping us come back next year! As always, feel free to come and ask us questions via WordPress, Twitter, E-mail, or IRC.
Hey everyone, as you may know, Philly Tech Week is coming up in late April. Hive76, as always likes to make ourselves as available possible during the week, and offer as much as we can. We’ll be open from 5pm-10pm Mon-Thur, and Noon-10pm on Saturday while showing off one unique and interesting aspect of what we do each day.Update: There’s no registration required for these events.
Lately, a few members have been discussing the use of 3D printed parts in use with metal casting techniques to create some stronger, lighter and more durable parts. As all good hackerspace conversations do, we immediately decided to go with the most painful and difficult solution: Metal Casting. Luckily for us the very next day, we got an e-mail that a local group, Philadelphia Sculpture Gym, that they intended on hosting an aluminium greensand casting class. A perfect opportunity to learn some metal casting techniques, even if not totally applicable to what we wanted to ultimately end up casting. Andrew S., and myself both signed up along with a few friends of Hive76.
About 30 minutes into making our own greensand molds, we realized that this was going to be a difficult process, and immediately destroyed several hours of work trying to get a good crisp mold for our first pour.
Several hours into our class, we managed to finally get a good solid mold of a 3D printed TARDIS. We hopped in line and got a pretty good looking cast. Andrew also attempted the TARDIS with some success. He also managed to get some good casts of a wooden puzzle, including one that blew out. However, due to our earlier troubles, we decided to hedge our bets and get one more good pour out of the class before we would start wrapping up. While waiting to pour ours, I was being shown how to work the furnace by Gus, and ended up melting down plenty of scrap and helping others make their pours which was a lot of fun to be working with. The furnace was operating at about 1300 Celsius, and moving around molten metal at that temperature can be quite a thrill. We plan on working with Gus and Darla at Philadelphia Sculpture Gym on some other types of casting techniques, especially as they apply to our 3D printing. We look forward to working with them in the future, and hope you all consider taking their next Greensand class in January.
CNN stopped by the space last night, Oct 22nd to interview some of the guys on their projects for a report called “Made in America” which airs Tomorrow, Oct 24th. However, we did shoot some cool video and photos alongside them. There’s a full album available on our Facebook page. We were also fortunate enough to get some quick shots of our projects at work.
Hive76 sure made the rounds at this year’s Maker Faire. With 2 tables in the 3D Printing Village, we had a steady stream of visitors both
days, ranging from Chocolateers, Digital Artists, to young children asking about 3D printing toys and parts for their projects. Discussion started about 10 minutes after we left Maker Faire for what to do next year. Check out the album for some quick snapshots of this year’s events including Karaoke, Thumb Wrestling, and of course, the occasional interview.
