At this very early stage in developing my business a lot of what I’m doing is helping people understand what I can do for them. Here’s something I made to take over and show the guys at the Hack Factory, home to Twin Cities Maker, a great bunch of folks who prove that Yankee Ingenuity is alive and well, and thriving in Minneapolis’ Seward Neighborhood.

The “Hack Factory” is a community workshop which incorporates all aspects of making stuff, from wood and metalworking to circuit design and software. The shop is only for the use of dues-paying members, but they invite the public in on Wednesday nights to see the shop and the stuff they’ve been working on.

I’m looking to support them by making stuff for the shop and also for the projects being built there,  so I made this on the router out of 3/16″ (.185) aluminum.

I started by grabbing a bitmap of their logo off their website, then importing that into VCarve Pro, where I used that programs tracing capabilities to create vectors of the outline. A little manual straightening and tuning followed.

Next, I added the “Hack Factory” text. After a bit of looking for a suitable font, I settled on the seventies style retro computer font because I thought it went well with the “T” in the logo (which to my eye looks sort of like a pad on a circuit board), plus it cuts well with a 3/16″ bit, which is what I have on hand. VCarve Pro makes it easy to wrap text on a curve and adjust the letter spacing (kerning).

There are a number of things which could be refined in a future iteration, but I was quite satisfied, and when I brought it to last Wednesday’s gathering I think it really helped folks understand what I can do, and how I can speed their projects along.

I love the maker movement because it encourages people to look inside the “black boxes” which increasingly populate our lives, and repurpose  the  contents into stuff that’s fun, functional, and thought provoking.