Tinkertank awakens in downtown Modesto

“How do Jedis do it so fast?” a father asked no one in particular as he worked with his young son – or should that be padawan – to build a lightsaber in downtown Modesto on Monday afternoon.

This was no cardboard cylinder wrapped with aluminum foil or colored cellophane. This was a from-scratch, light-up toy that took about three hours to build. It involved wiring together and soldering a network of 19 light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, attaching a power source and on/off button and fitting it inside a PVC hilt and a “blade” of clear plastic tubing sanded to diffuse the light.

A dozen people – six women, two girls, three men and a boy – gathered at the soon-to-open Downtown Tinkertank workspace at 12th and J streets to take the prototype class. Tinkertank founder/“master chief” Brie Parmer and employee/“doer of things” Amanda Wood offered the free session to get feedback and make adjustments before it becomes one of the offerings when the business’s doors open early next month.

Downtown Tinkertank will be “Modesto’s first public makerspace,” according to its website, downtowntinkertank.com. With equipment including 3-D printers, a laser cutter, a vinyl printer and cutter, a router, sewing machines, saws, grinders and more, it will be a place people of all skill levels can come to learn and create projects, Parmer said.

Offering the prototype class on lightsabers – the Jedi and Sith weapons of choice in the “Star Wars” universe – on Monday made sense with “The Force Awakens” opening this week, Parmer said. She noted that a Harry Potter-themed class (Wood is fan of the young wizard’s tales, and a new Potter-related movie is coming out next year) also will be taught. “There will be a wand-making class at some point,” Parmer said. “It will use UV light, so it will light up invisible ink.”

Parmer and Wood used word of mouth, including social media, to fill their class Monday. Bonnie Ohara, a friend of both women, brought 8-year-old daughter Sophia, a student at Fremont Open Plan. “I think it’s awesome to have a place to bring my daughter to get her interested in engineering projects,” Ohara said. She likes to do projects with Sophia at home, “but we don’t always have the expertise or supplies. Ours are more biology and nature experiments, like growing salt crystals.”

Sam Pierstorff, the aforementioned father, was building a lightsaber with son Deen, 7. “I thought making lightsabers sounded rad,” Sam said. But they didn’t attend primarily because they’re “Star Wars” fans. “I want to see places like this thrive. Places like this could be awesome for kids and families downtown,” he said.

The Modesto Junior College English professor and former poet laureate of Modesto added: “I am definitely a right-brain thinker. This place will help me exercise the left part.”

Parmer, who’s spent much of the past two years working toward opening Downtown Tinkertank, hopes a lot of people share that enthusiasm. As she’s traveled the country to visit other makerspaces to learn how they’re succeeding, Parmer has worked for her stepfather’s business, Justin W. Capp Engineering & Design.

Capp Engineering, located in the same building as Tinkertank, is big into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and has done a lot with Hickman Charter School, Parmer said. It pays staff engineers to go out and teach classes such as robotics, woodworking, electronics and 3-D design, she said.

The 26-year-old got to help create a “maker garage” at Hickman Charter, she said, and loves seeing how projects bring out the best in a lot of students who don’t do well in traditional classrooms. “In the makerspace, a whole different group of kids shines,” she said. She recalled a boy who equipped a skateboard with a speedometer and LEDs, so the faster he rode, the faster the lights flashed.

The children at Monday’s class were attentive students who dove right in to sanding their lightsaber tubes and even helped with soldering. The toughest part of the project was stripping bits of insulation from speaker wires to attach the LEDs, so that work was left to grown-ups as the kids took a break to duel with their incomplete lightsabers.

A driving force in creating the Tinkertank, Parmer said, was to have experts teaching children (and adults) things they couldn’t on a school campus. At the downtown workspace, she showed an octopus sculpture of plaster and metal. Two 12-year-old girls made it, including welding the armature for the eight-legged creature.

“A school would never, ever let me teach welding to 12-year-olds,” she said.

She hopes Tinkertank will open children’s eyes to a whole world of vocational and avocational possibilities. “Kids only think about professions they have experience with, like being a teacher,” Parmer said. Most children, unless they have engineers in the family, have no idea what the profession entails, she said.

Tinkertank will offer classes in electronics, 3-D design, textiles, such as sewing and screenprinting, woodworking and metalworking. There will be different types of classes, she said, including the basics, skill development and make-and-take, like the lightsaber class.

It also will offer memberships – “like a gym, only instead of a treadmill, you have access to a laser cutter,” Parmer said. Membership means not only access to the space, but discounts on classes, workshops and space rentals.

The membership pricing hasn’t been worked out quite yet, Parmer said, but there will be different levels to make Tinkertank accessible to everyone from entrepreneurs to teens looking for a place to do work after school. There also will be opportunities to do work – teach a class, build Tinkertank furniture, even do basic cleanup – that counts toward membership, she said.

The business will stock materials including filaments for 3-D printers, vinyl for the printer and supplies for laser-cut projects, like rubber stamps. And what are some of the things people might create with a 3-D printer? They range “from eyeglasses and prosthetics to replicas of art pieces and architecture, all the way to toys and action figures,” Parmer said.

The operation is entirely privately funded through loans and Parmer’s savings, she said. “There is substantial investment” in the equipment, she said, but also in cameras and other security measures.

“In all honesty, it would be easier to open in a bigger city, (but) I wanted to do it here,” Parmer said. “I’m from Modesto, I like Modesto. We’re a big city, and there’s no reason we can’t have awesome things, too. We have enough people.

“People can be a bit wary of downtown,” she added, “but if everyone’s wary of it, cool businesses won’t come here.”

This story was originally published December 16, 2015 at 3:46 PM with the headline "Tinkertank awakens in downtown Modesto."