Photos with comments from Uppsala Makerspace! (UMS)
Note: All these photos are already obsolete, alltho it has been less than a year. Instead see the 2022 post for photos.
History note: According to the Wikipedia article, the particular makerspace tradition started in Germany in the 1990s with the CCC, the Chaos Computer Club. But the concept of a community workshop is likely to be as old as the workshop idea itself. Some guy in the stone age probably said at a village meeting, "Hey guys, let's put all our stuff in that cave!" and then that's what happened ...
The first thing I did when I started to be more active at UMS was to organize and clean the wood shop. (BrE carpentry; träverkstad or snickeri in Swedish) It mostly involved moving stuff around - putting everything along the walls, moving cables behind machines, getting rid of everything broken and moving all little loose ends away from the floor and onto shelves and into boxes. This to make it more functional and facilitate cleaning, but also to make the place look good. Cleaning was then just a matter of sweeping, more sweeping, and sweeping more ...
We had a public evening planned when all the machines were to be introduced and explained so I wanted the whole place to look exemplary before then. And when the night came, the mood turned out really good! People were relaxed and almost every single one took part in the discussion and wanted to share their own area of expertise.
Today, Russia is known as an exporter of oil, natural gas, and arms. But during the Soviet period a vast array of industrial products were exported. However not a lot of that ended up in Sweden.
Back then Sweden had its own huge manufacturing industry so what one sought to do was to have the wealthy Swedes buy their own goods to support the industry and to keep out for example the much cheaper but probably comparable Soviet gear.
Also, despite Sweden not being a NATO member and often speaking up against "US imperialism" - the Vietnam war in particular - Sweden was during the whole Cold War period the super-militarized, armed-to-the-teeth northern pillar stone in the West's defence system against the Soviet Union. So while the Russians had their monstrous military-industrial complex, so did everyone else, even (especially) us.
A long time ago my grandfather was the owner and operator of a similar shop, only bigger since it was on the countryside and back then one repaired a whole lot more different items than we do today. The most common commodity up for repair was the radio - advanced enough to disfunction, yet simple enough to fix. And almost everyone had one.
Since that time "development has gone forward" but I'd like to think if he was still around he'd soon enough know his way around this, much more modern shop as well.
