With TechShop slowly expanding, GE seems to be jumping into the same space with GE Garages. Further, they are partnering with several companies in the process, and TechShop is one of them.
GE Garages are a series of skill-building centers developed in partnership with Skillshare, TechShop, Quirky, Make and Inventables that serve as manufacturing labs for technologists, entrepreneurs and every day Americans. Kicking-off with mobile pop-ups in Austin and Houston, TX, and San Francisco, CA, and then with long-term locations in Houston and Cincinnati OH, GE Garages will offer a one-of-a-kind opportunity for visitors to learn about the invention prototyping and manufacturing processes, receive support in product building, collaborate in hands-on maker workshops, participate in trainings on high-tech prototyping equipment and learn from guest speakers.
This is excellent. It makes sense for GE to do this, they certainly have the capital to fund shops of this sort and providing more hands on opportunities for people to build their dreams and learn new skills and maybe get themselves started in a manufacturing career with GE makes it a win for everyone.
If a few more major manufacturing companies get on board with this idea, imagine the possibilities.
Link: GE Garages via Make
Rich says
They are getting closer but have yet to arrive in the Fort Worth-Dallas area. I hold out hope.
GuitarSlinger says
You’ve got to wonder why other manufactures with assembly and design still located in the US haven’t done this as well . Get em in a DIY mode while they’re young . Wet their appetites and before you know it we’ve got another generation of Engineers /Inventors and Just Plain Doers that maybe ……. just maybe might bring the US back to its once held position as the best manufacturing as well as source of innovation in the World .
Two Thumbs up to GE . Now bring some of that work back here as well please
Steve Hog Radio producer Johann says
Great idea, would love to see it expand possibly partner up with Technical Colleges and VO Tec Schools around the states. My two oldest sons would be great benefactors of such things as this.
Lets hope this catches on with other companies.
Carolynne says
That is a great idea. I would go check it out for sure
AlwaysOnTwo says
Hey @Kneeslider and all others….
…
The only time a major player(s) gets into a market is because a) someone has already proven it works, and b) the masses lack the resources to do the same.
I’d like to address the latter. Especially as it applies to the “biker” community. …
… Long ago in a distant time, I posted a reply here about how my shop and eventual business got started. I’m not Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. djust a guy with a passion. And at the time, not much cash, lots of med bills from an encounter with a 64 Chevy Grill while riding a Sportster. My loooong and booring story won’t be recounted here again in detail, but let’s just agree that when encased in a body cast, wheeled around in a cart to eat. sleep and, well uhhum, you can learn alot about being strong, independent, and totally connected to those around you.
That last one is the clue.
You are bikers. Or motorcyclists. Or weekend warriors of the horsepower kind. And unless you’re brain dead and wearing an Outlaws patch, you two finger down every other self-styled rider coming toward you. You connect, for a nano-second. What if you could spin the bike around and hand the other rider your card, phone number, email? Too busy, too bold, or just too aloof and self centered?
In prior posts I’ve pointed out that volunteering (internship) in virtually any field of interest is a lot better than quafing a few more at happy hour in search of Karma. Lessons and skills learned are the real difference from us and the animals, ya know, those guys and gals that go to Quicky Lube on the weekend and send the undies out to be dry cleaned. So why are you waving the biker greeting and ignoring the truth??
My shop is open to any biker (or aspiring version thereof) that just has the decency and common respect to ask, not as a potential customer, but as an entusiast, for a little “grok” time. “cause I have received mucho more in times past, and can’t understand why “enthusiasts” don’t do more than give the wave.
Along the way to building, and sharing, my shop…I’ve volunteered hours in a foundry to learn metallurgic basics, interned on community projects to restore old cable cars and boats, welded half frames of VW’s into dragsters and shoveled a ton of sawdust.
And once or twice, or a few times more, I’ve ventured together with a ‘nother “biker” to buy a tool or two. Yeah, once there was this sexual attraction to a Ducati factory model and all that….but really, it all boils down to co-operative and imaginative realization of the things we do on a daily basis.
Just riding a bike and waving a high sign doesn’t get it.
So you’re thinking, this guy is all about himself? Right?? No, I’m asking, why in the hell don’t you get to know the bikers you pass on the road beyond drinking a few brews or trekking to some lame “event” on weekends? And BTW, that guy two doors down from me (and quite possibly a similar guy from you) is the VP of coach cruiser repair shop(read $1.5 mil K RV homes for Ashton groupies) shop that has more tools, experience, and wrenchead skills than 20 years of Kneeslider articles could ever document (sorry Paul, there is life beyond the internet).
Bottom line…get to know the guys and gals you so eagerly wave the sign to while gripping the bars. You might be uber-surprised at who they really are and what resources are available without some corporate attempt to provide something that you should already have at hand….
…
Pay for it. Suck the corporate mentality that says you’ll buy into this crap because all motorbike riders are idiots that live in apartments and don’t know SQUAT….I mean, after all, you think you have skills that require advanced machinery but you are lacking in an SAE wrench set? PuuuLLeeeeze!!
You know my email, and my shop is open for those that actually want to get hands dirty. No theory, no sliderules, no marketing hype to sell this or that. No @Kneeslider exposure.
If you are around Inverness Fl, que me. If you’re somewhere else, ask for guys like me. But if you are a brain dead blog reader waiting for someone to give you what you will never be able to understand, a concept here, PARTICIPATION……well
…
Rent or own. Which do you think is better??
Amazing concept.
Friend with benefits.
Peace. Out.
Paulinator says
My friend at the pub down-loaded “Live” concert video and played it for me on his crystal-clear G4 android. The “performer” was an animated CGI holographic image of an artist who’d been dead for 15 years. Incidentally, the guy on the bar stool on the other side of me (with a beer in one hand and smoke in the other) was a retired surgeon with a replacement 22 year old Porto-Rican heart beating in his chest. Change happens.
I think that GE is laying down plans to cash-in on a tsunami that is still maybe a decade away. The current point-of-sale business model will be re-written with the advent of cost-effective and flawless additive manufacturing materials, processes and machinery. GE is beginnig to nuture along a savey group of techies that will become the early adopters when that wave hits.
Just think about it…go down to the GEnko’s and print up a new intake manifold that is all the latest (up-to-the-minute) $h!t in squeezing out an extra XX per-cent torque at YYYYY RPM. It has CCW internal vortex generators of previously impossible to produce geometry plus the material selected sports a nano-structure that conducts heat away from the fuel-air charge better than diamond and weighs less than aero gel…and costs only 30% more than styrene (which is outlawed, anyway). Oh ya, while you’re waiting, you get your feet scanned and print up some new boots. They grip ice, deflect IEDs, weigh less than your tennis shoes, correct you fallen arch while making you taller…and fit perfectly the first time you wear’em. And guess what??? Yup…its all printed on GE’s equipment.
Nicolas says
Wow … Didn’t get the point of all that rant against that initiative … Well probably because my email adress ends by “@ge.com” … I don’t get it, so I’ll consider the glass half full and consider that it’s a positive initiative. And that same company also provides me with a paycheck that make me buy/fix/rebuild/ride motorcycles and it’s all good !
Paulinator says
The future’s bright. GE is doing a great deed. I hope it pays off for them, because it’ll for all of us.
Bryan S. says
While i want to see these all over the US… I always have to wonder what the deal is for GE. Being the largest lobbying firm, and the company that constantly gets legislation passed to ban US made items so It can move overseas and make a better profit (think those spiral light bulbs) and then working out to pay no corporate income tax, while their press operations (NBC) give free publicity and push for GE technologies under the veil of just good progress.
I love the idea of Techshop, and would work hard to find the place to have one open up in my town, and then run it. It would be a dream job, and a piece of the fabric that makes for a strong population.
I just have a mistrust of GE. Maybe it is ill placed, but it is there.
BonesDT says
Should be wearing gloves while stick welding.
tom says
I went to check it out . .. I work in manufactering (multi axis water jets) we even do some work for GE.. very cool apart from the hot girls in the machinist aprons it was super cool seeing young people exploring the tech they had. I even learned a few things and found out about workgroups that will advance my skill set.
the people i saw welding wore gloves.