Bob Brown's Readie Machine: The Workshops

This is part 2 of the Bob Brown’s Readie Machine series. Check out part 1.

The project is being spearheaded by Eric White of the American Literature department of Brookes University. To get a better feeling about the scope of the project please see his talk at TEDxWhitehall earlier this year.

As part of doing outreach for the project the team organised a series of workshops in collaboration with the County Council Libraries Makerspace in the Westgate Shopping Centre aimed at 12-18 year olds.

The brief for this was simple. Make sure the attendees have all they need to build the machine. That meant giving them some boards to assemble their work. So for this I cleaned up some pallet wood rescued from a local coffee roaster. To take it a bit further I made some larger boards and put them together with glue and dowels.

In the meantime I found out about a new trend called knolling which means rearranging items so that you can see each individual component.

For the workshops we bought a set of vintage mecanno sets as current day mecanno sets are extremely expensive. We were missing a lot of pieces as they were quite expensive so I decided to 3D print a set of bevelled gears.

On the day we had 2 groups formed and they all worked hard in a very short timespan. For the second workshop we also tasked them with writing a short article about what writing would look like in 50 years from now and printed it on a reel their machines were built to take.