Only a few weeks after the “make a grill” versus “buy a grill” debate, I had the opportunity to attend the World Maker Faire in New York City. This was the third Maker Faire I had attended, but it was a very different experience. Instead of being an amazed onlooker, I was there to participate: Eric and I brought an early version of our OpenROV to exhibit at the Faire.

I learned so much that weekend. I took so much away from the speakers and presenters, many of whom were experienced makers that I had grown to admire. I was absorbing their talks like a sponge. No longer a passive observer to the maker movement, I was now actively doing my best to follow in their footsteps, and each of the talks overflowed with wisdom that I could apply directly to my experience.

Like the other Maker Faires, I was inspired by the exhibitors. In the moments that I could sneak away from the OpenROV booth, I found myself deep in conversation with other makers—discussing their projects, their process, and any advice they had for a relative beginner like me. For example, the DIY Sous Vide Cooker that the couple in the booth next to us had created (more on these two in Chapter 7). They broke down all the components of their homebuilt contraption, how they built it and how they programmed the Arduino microcontroller to fine-tune the deep fry temperature. They even let me sample a deep fried egg yolk.

The best learning experience, however, was standing at the OpenROV booth and showing off the robot to onlookers. With only an early prototype on the table, ours wasn’t much of an exhibit; it was more of an evolving discussion of underwater robotics. Some Faire-goers stayed for over an hour to talk about the design, pulling up chairs to draw out ideas and answer questions. Many of them stopped by multiple times. We learned much more than we taught.

Of all the great people and interesting projects, one conversation stood out among all the rest. Just as the Faire was winding down for the evening on Saturday, Gareth Branwyn stopped by the OpenROV booth to check in. As I mentioned before, Gareth was the Editorial Director at Make: at the time and was the one to whom I had initially pitched the Zero to Maker idea. The entire column was really an outgrowth of that conversation. Gareth was my long-distance mentor. Having met many reluctant makers, he understood where I was coming from, and was always there to provide encouragement and support. Over the past few months of writing the column, Gareth and I had traded numerous emails and talked several times over the phone, but this was the first time we had met in person.

I had learned so much in the past few months, I didn’t know where to start. With our underwater robot sitting on the table, the conversation naturally started there. I pointed out all the different features, but after an extensive overview of OpenROV and the different components. He seemed surprised how much I knew, and half-jokingly asked me, “So, looking back, do you think you’ve gone from Zero to Maker?”

Although I should’ve been more prepared for it, the question caught me off guard. It was the first time I had really taken stock of everything I’d learned thus far. I certainly didn’t feel like I had made any real progress; I could still only see the mountain of things I didn’t know. But as my mind went through a montage sequence of how much I’d learned over the past few months, I realized I had come pretty far. I thought back to an illustration I had seen during a presentation that weekend from Nathan Seidle, CEO of an open-source electronics manufacturing company called SparkFun. I answered Gareth, “You know what? I think I’m getting there.”

I then went on to explain this graphic from the presentation:

Nathan told us that his goal was to continually expand the “Stuff I Know I Don’t Know” slice—that’s how he measured his growth. For me, the same is true about my maker journey. Of course, my “Stuff I Know” slice has increased, but not nearly as fast as the “Stuff I Know I Don’t Know,” and that’s great. My original goal was learning “enough to be dangerous,” which means knowing how to ask better questions and knowing where to begin looking for answers. Like everything worthwhile, the more you know, the more you realize there is to learn.

I was starting to think like a maker. In my mind, I’d mentally deconstruct everything I came across, wondering how things work, trying to take them apart, figuring out if I could build them myself. I started jumping at the opportunity to fix things; no longer seeing that as a tedious task but an exciting learning opportunity. I viewed the world differently.

No maker is an island. Well, except for Tim Anderson. Tim is in a league all his own. National Public Radio (NPR) ran a half-hour feature on him called “Tim Anderson, Bay Area DIY Superhero.” If any one person completely embodies the maker mentality, it’s him.^[6]

I first learned about Tim online through his ongoing series of updates, “The Free Yacht Saga,” on Instructables.^[7] At the time (years before my making quest) I was managing a sailing school in Berkeley, California, and was fascinated to learn about seemingly good boats that were being given away. Tim’s story in particular seemed pretty incredible—a group of friends who were given an old boat and brought it back to a useful life with salvaged materials and elbow grease. The story was as much about their wacky adventures as it was their DIY techniques. As it turned out, the Free Boat Saga was just the tip of the iceberg.

After reading more of his stories and learning that he was based only a few miles away, I invited Tim to give an evening presentation at our sailing school about what he’d learned during his process. After a series of emails back and forth, we found a time and date that worked. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but after reading through all of the Free Yacht entries I knew it was going to be interesting.

On the night of the event, I was even more anxious and unsure of what was in store. There was a decent turnout for the talk, with the crowd made up of about half sailing club members and half Tim’s friends. Tim was running late, and because I hadn’t heard from him in days, I began to worry that he’d forgotten. However, as I talked with some of his friends, they assured me that he was on his way. They also had insider’s grins that hinted we were in for a surprise. That made me more nervous. He arrived shortly thereafter—without shoes on.

With about 25 people in the room, Tim began the presentation. Listening to him talk about the Free Yacht Saga was much better than reading about it online. Hearing him explain it added an entirely different dimension. The free boat seemed to be symbolic of Tim’s worldview: that our culture is full of perfectly useful things that are being, literally, thrown away. He was on a mission to prove that with a little creativity, it’s easy to find utility in these discarded items. And besides, building and fixing things is just way more fun.

Each slide had an image of the boat (actually, boats) in progress, accompanied by a hilarious and unbelievable backstory. In one episode, they managed to fit almost 40 people on board for a Fourth of July celebration until the coast guard showed up to spoil the party. On another, he told us the story of when the boat was sinking while simultaneously being on fire. I looked around the room at members of the sailing school—more traditional sailing types, most of them older than Tim and friends—and their mouths were agape. This certainly wasn’t the safety-first sailing we had been teaching at the school. Many of the members approached me after the presentation and remarked that they seriously questioned the seamanship skills of Tim’s crew but, boy, did it look like they were having a lot of fun.

Exactly.

Over a year later, as I arrived back in San Francisco and set my sights on learning to make, I got back in touch with Tim. I emailed him to tell him my plan, and to let him know I was available to help with any projects he was working on. He responded right away, offering suggestions on getting started and inviting me to come work on a new project he was embarking on. He described it simply as “gardening with heavy machinery.”

Tim told me to meet him at “the tower,” an old air traffic control tower on the decommissioned Air Force base on Alameda island in the San Francisco Bay. The tower had been converted to an office building that housed a number of renewable energy startups, as well as a full machine and fabrication shop. Because it’s an old Air Force base, there’s plenty of available space to test a kite that can generate high-altitude wind power (which they do), or an inflatable robot (which they’ve done), or garden with heavy machinery. Tim bills himself as the pro bono night watchman for the startups that inhabit the old facility. As far as I can surmise, this means he keeps a small office and shares tools with the companies.

When I showed up, I asked my way around the building for Tim and ended up finding him in the kitchen, just finishing up a plate of eggs. He saw me and asked, “Oh great, you’re here. You ready to build some sustainable infrastructure?”

One of Tim’s goals for the year was to grow his own food. For most people, this would involve creating a garden and planting a few vegetables. For Tim, this involved creating massive structures out of reclaimed materials, transplanting fruit trees, and determining how they could survive with only the average rainfall for the area. Definitely not your typical backyard gardener.

This particular day’s activities involved turning an old piece of dock from the Emeryville Marina into a raised-bed garden.^[8] The old dock—about 15 feet long and 4 feet high—conveniently revealed a four-section trough when it was out of the water and flipped upside down. It was perfectly suited to housing the self-sustaining gardens Tim was envisioning. He walked me through the overall strategy, including his design for making sure that these gardens would need as little maintenance as possible. He explained how using hollow caverns created from halved barrels and covered with fast-wicking material would make sure that any precipitation would be absorbed and stored.

After the detailed explanation, I was surprised that the first step was painting the old dock, which seemed to be more about aesthetics than anything else. I actually think Tim started with a paint brush and roller to ease me into it.

After a few hours of painting, the next step was to cut the barrels in half so they would fit inside the hollowed-out dock. Tim handed me a circular saw, gave me a few pointers to make sure I didn’t cut my leg off, and let me at it. He wandered away, working on setting up the next task and equipment. I made a few cuts with the saw, playing within the safety guidelines Tim had drawn. By about the fourth barrel, I had it down. I was feeling much more comfortable. By the time Tim came back, I was cutting the barrels like an under-skilled amateur, which was a big step up from a hopeless beginner. Next, we realized that we needed to cut away more of the siding in order to fit the half-barrels in. Tim gave me a reciprocating saw, some general guidelines and, again, wandered off. I had no choice but to try to get comfortable with the tool.

I think Tim knew what he was doing. I think he knew that the best way to start making is to just start doing it. His walking away meant I had no other options. Sometimes, having someone around who knows what they’re doing is a crutch, and you can insulate yourself with questions. It’s important to get the basics—especially with regards to safety—but after that, the learning takes place with your hands.

Unfortunately, you have to be careful how you use the term “enough to be dangerous.” It isn’t always the best advice, especially when you’re talking about circular saws and other power tools. In those circumstances, the opposite is true: try to learn enough not to be dangerous.

That was Tim’s teaching strategy—drawing the general safety guidelines and letting me explore. Then I had to build my own confidence with the tool.

For new makers, it’s both. Learn enough to be dangerous in the philosophical sense, but also enough not to be dangerous in terms of safety.

“Have you had the forklift lesson yet?” Tim asked me.

“Well yes, but…” I replied with a lot of hesitation. I had, in fact, been shown how to use the forklift, technically at least. My forklift education consisted of a quick run-through of the controls from someone who had also been briefly introduced to the piece of equipment. And that was weeks ago.

“Great! Then you can show Mac how to use it.” Tim instructed me, gesturing toward the forklift. Then he walked away, across the expansive lot of the old air traffic control tower, to work on something else. Mac looked at me, bright-eyed and eager for my explanation. I was stuck. I had to explain how to use a very big tool that I’d only used once, and barely so.

I climbed up into the seat of the forklift and looked around, trying to jog my memory by re-enacting the physical motion. I started with the easy things: the ignition, gas pedal, brake, forward, and reverse. After I started identifying the ones I knew, a few more came back to me: opening the gas tank, raising the fork, tilting the fork. Before I knew it, I had almost everything I thought was relevant. Mac jumped in the seat to test out my instructions. As he put the forklift in reverse and started to back up, something didn’t seem right. I heard Tim yell from across the yard, “You’ll want to pull the lift up before you drive.”

“Oh yeah, that too.” I echoed to Mac. I should have remembered that.

As soon as I had shown Tim that I was comfortable using a tool, or taking care of one of the tasks, he’d leave it to me to explain it to anyone else who was volunteering that day. Although he never told me explicitly, I think he did that so I would get a better grasp of what I was doing. And I did. It’s fairly straightforward to learn something that someone shows you how to do, but it takes another level of understanding to be able to explain it to someone else. With the forklift, I had to quickly think back to my brief experience as well as the explanation I received. When I jogged my memory—going from what was obvious, to what I remembered, to what I suspected—I was exposing the gaps in my understanding. Also, the new forklift driver, Mac, asked me a few questions, which really cemented the points I was uncertain about.

I felt a lot of pressure. Was he going to crash it? Was something going to break? When Tim told us to raise the fork, I was actually relieved. If that was all I missed during my explanation, I had done pretty well. That emotional roller coaster—feeling the pressure of knowing, and the relief of acceptable understanding—is an essential part of building confidence.

Almost every maker I’ve talked to is eager to share everything they know, and they’re ready to help you know it, too. This culture of teaching was in stark contrast to the culture I grew up in. At every level of school, there was only one teacher and that person did all the teaching.

In maker culture, everybody is a teacher as well as a learner. At Make:SF, every meeting starts off with a show and tell of any new projects people are working on. TechShop calls their courses Safety and Basic Use classes, while most of the actual learning happens from experimentation and advice from other members. Every project on Instructables is a step-by-step guide on how it comes together, and nearly every step is full of commenters with tips (and colorful stories) of what might work better, or won’t work at all. Every time I’ve exhibited at Maker Faire, I’ve spent more time getting good advice and suggestions from others than I did explaining what I’ve done. It’s a big part of maker culture and a critical part of the maker mentality: share what you know.

The maker world has come a long way since the days of Gershenfeld’s class at MIT, but the spirit of the “intellectual pyramid scheme” is alive and well. The propensity to share knowledge—no matter how recently it was acquired, how incomplete the project, or how embarrassing the failure—remains a hallmark of the maker community. Amazing in-person and online communities have formed around the sharing of projects, ideas, and techniques.

Not surprisingly, the list of places to share is the same as places to learn: Instructables, Make: Projects, Maker Faire, makerspaces, or meetups. The learning and sharing are intertwined.

For our OpenROV project, we’ve found that the more we share, the more people share with us, and the better our project becomes. We’ve worked hard at sharing, and the better we’ve gotten, the more help we’ve received. Here are some tips for getting the most out of sharing your work:

Hanging around with Tim was a constant look into the mind of a maker. I was continually soaking up information and techniques—taking mental notes and thinking in terms of “OK, now what would Tim do?”

I learned a lot from him. However, successfully mimicking the methods of a maker superhero weren’t nearly as enlightening as the big, obvious moments in which I was clearly not thinking like the rest of the group. It was those profoundly uncomfortable experiences when I had the most to learn. One of the most vivid lessons came the first time we water-tested our OpenROV.

Eric and I had finally come to a point in the process at which the next logical step was to test the robot in the water. There were still a lot of question marks, of course, but there was really no excuse for not taking the plunge.

I called my aunt, who lives about 45 minutes south of San Francisco, and asked if we could use her pool to test our robot. Even though she was thoroughly confused, she agreed.

Eric and I met at her house the following Sunday afternoon. Eric brought the robot, which he had taken home after the last time we worked on it. He told me he needed to make some final tweaks before it was ready for submersion. When he knocked on my aunt’s door, he had the ROV in hand already connected to his laptop, with the control program up and running. Apparently he was worried it would stop working if he closed his browser. I should have taken that as a bad sign.

We set up our experiment in the backyard around the swimming pool with my curious aunt looking on. We wanted to get video of the experience and decided that Eric would be the videographer, leaving me to control the ROV. As Eric positioned the underwater camera, I tested the motors; they all ran perfectly but were about to be put to the true test below the surface. I lowered the robot into the water, and walked back to the controls. Eric watched intently. I got back to the laptop and fired the forward thrusters (the two back propellers that would push the robot). They worked! Well, they worked for a few minutes anyway, before one of the propellers stopped responding to the signals. We took out the robot and tried again, and it worked again briefly. Pretty soon, though, no matter what tricks or alterations we tried, the ROV was still underpowered.

It was at this moment, when I realized that all of our previous work hadn’t accomplished our goal, that I saw the difference between Eric and myself: I was completely useless. There was nothing I could suggest that would be of any help. While I was dwelling on the fact that it wasn’t working, Eric was already going through possible solutions, running calculations, trying different configurations, and suggesting alternatives.

My perspective on the moment was different than Eric’s. Different in a way that couldn’t be attributed to our level of interest or initiative. I was, just like Eric, completely fascinated and intrigued by everything we were working on. I had, just like Eric, the willpower to try something new. Something else was different, though, something deeper than initiative and less formal than a Master’s degree in engineering. The difference had everything to do with Eric’s incorrigible willingness to try things another way. I’ve come to define that distinctly maker trait as the persistent-tinkering mentality (PTM) and I didn’t have it. Not naturally, anyway.

The PTM is tough to describe, but you know it when you see it. It’s a combination of unshakeable optimism, unlimited opportunity, and never-ending satisfaction. It’s living in a perpetual state of “well, what if we tried…” This was new to me. Eric has a persistent-tinkering mentality. He never sees a project as finished; there’s always something that can be tweaked or improved. When a point of potential failure arises, he’s already moving down an alternative path.

Up until this point, I had been cruising by these moments of potential failure because I always had someone to lean on: Eric to explain the design, Tim to show me a new tool, an instructor at TechShop to warn me of an overlooked preparation step. But sitting there, watching our robot in the pool, I was in the same place as Eric. We were both looking over the edge of the what-I-know-how-to-do cliff. I was paralyzed by the uncertainty, whereas Eric was busy making a mental hang glider. I asked him about this later, after I had processed my failure for what it was. How was he able to react so resourcefully? He told me it comes from lots of experience, from facing “mistakes” so often that the PTM becomes second nature.

I learned something from that experience, something much more fundamental than how to hold a soldering iron or adjust the settings on a MIG welder. I learned that if I really wanted to become a maker, I was going to have to develop a persistent-tinkering mentality. I have to remind myself every time I face a point of failure, regardless if there’s someone more experienced around to lend a guiding hand, that it’s an opportunity to exercise the PTM muscle—to practice building those mental hang gliders.

As it turns out, there’s quite a bit of science to back up my sinking robot epiphany. Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, is one of the world’s leading researchers of motivation. Her book, Mindset (Ballantine Books, 2007), describes something very similar to the PTM that I have identified in makers. She calls it a growth mindset, which she says is “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”

Dweck compares the growth mindset to what she calls a fixed mindset—a mentality steeped in personal judgement—that situational outcomes are directly related to an individual’s natural, unchanging ability. I had exhibited a fixed mindset when the thrusters on our robot failed, attributing the setback to my lack of capability. Eric had exhibited more of a growth mindset. In Dweck’s research, people with growth mindsets typically respond to challenges with even more effort. In fact, they never even realize they’re failing—they always see it as learning.

During our pool experiment, Eric knew he was learning. I was learning, too, I suppose. I learned that makers exhibit a special type of growth mindset, one that never views a project as complete and is always looking for ways to improve. It sees a sinking robot and thinks, “Hey, at least the electronics compartment stayed dry. We can work with that!”

Luckily, I had Eric there to show me what a PTM looked like. After we pulled the robot out of the pool and assessed what we learned, we brainstormed a list of changes that we could make to improve performance. We were able to think of a half-dozen ideas. I tasked myself with exploring new strategies for waterproofing the motors. This helped me to feel re-empowered, and that our goal was again a realistic possibility. Apparently, according to Dweck, this is exactly what fixed mindsetters should do in these situations. She suggests a way to trick your mind into the growth mindset by making a plan and sticking to it, regardless of self-pity. Easier to say than do, I think, but helpful nonetheless.

I spent the next day exploring new materials and processes. I felt a renewed excitement for the project and was eager to try out the new strategies. Having a check list of new experiments made me reframe the entire experience. I saw it as a valuable learning process. And if the next round of solutions didn’t work, at least I was mentally prepared to keep trying.

Writing the Zero to Maker column for Make: was a very fortunate situation. Through that experience, I was able to meet incredible makers and get advice from all of the Make: editors and readers. But more than that, I believe that forcing myself to write that column every week helped me develop a PTM of my own.

Just as Dweck suggests, I wrote down my intention (to learn enough to be dangerous) and plotted out a course to get there. Even when I bumped into hurdles, I knew that I still had to write about it, so I was constantly looking for the silver lining—the learning experience I could write about in the column. It became an unintentional PTM-building tool.

The good news is that you don’t need to write a column for Make: to replicate this experience. The access to makers is something you already have through Make:Forum and Instructables. And, it’s never been easier to create a blog to document your maker progress. You can easily set up a journal of projects or progress online.

It doesn’t matter if anybody else reads it. The process of writing is the real reward. It’s the perfect way to build a PTM. Also, it’s fun to look back at earlier posts to see the progress you’ve made.

You can easily create your own maker blog on sites like Wordpress or Tumblr. This is a great way to do it, especially if you have hopes to eventually create a community or discussion around your projects. You could also email one of the maker communities and ask the members if they have a good place to document progress; basically, the idea is to replicate my Zero to Maker column with a maker community of your own. For example, we’d be happy to have a new maker journal his or her experience with underwater robotics at OpenROV. In fact, we’d love it. I’m sure many other maker groups would agree.

I had already read about Alex Andon and his incredibly cool Desktop Jellyfish Tank project on several blogs, so I knew most of the easy details: he was a young-ish guy, a marine biologist by training, but his love for jellyfish and his maker spirit had brought him down a different path.^[9] Mesmerized by the fluid movement of the jellyfish, he wanted to create a tank for himself. When he learned that they required a specialized aquarium design in order to live in captivity, he—in true maker form—started experimenting with different designs in his garage. His design evolved and his experiments eventually turned into a small custom jellyfish tank design business.

When I learned that Alex was doing all of this from a warehouse mere blocks away from me in San Francisco, I had to stop by and see it for myself.

When I arrived to the address listed on the website, the delivery door was rolled open, exposing the entire office/warehouse to the street. I poked my head in, quite obviously wanting to ask someone a question, and a few folks looked up from their work. It didn’t look like a jellyfish operation, but I asked nonetheless. Alex popped up from behind a desk and shook my hand. He was just as affable and excited as he’d seemed in the video. He was obviously passionate about jellyfish; his knowledge of the creatures was obvious as he pointed out details in the breeding tanks. The most interesting part of the tour was hearing Alex describe the process of coming up with his current project, the desktop version of the tank (the one he was selling like crazy on Kickstarter). He told me about his initial prototypes and how he had to solve the simultaneous problems of keeping the water moving without the jellyfish getting sucked into one of the water pumps. It started with modifying existing tanks in his cousin’s garage using parts he picked up on Craigslist and evolved from there.

Alex’s jellyfish tank is a perfect example of what I’ve come to call an Unknown Project. This is something that no one has done before or a new twist on an old idea. Like Thwaites’ Toaster Project or the OpenROV, an Unknown Project is usually outside a maker’s comfort zone. It lacks any kind of instruction manual, and sometimes even a clear outcome. With Unknown Projects, the challenge of true problem solving can be both inspiring and engaging as well as highly intimidating. Unknown Projects require in-depth design thinking and usually a lot of failed attempts.

As counterintuitive as it might sound, finding an Unknown Project is actually a great way to get started as a new maker. Picking a really big, seemingly impossible project is a perfect way to frame the experience. It creates a roadmap of things to learn and it also takes a lot of pressure off the success of the final project. Even a failed attempt will be a wonderful story worth retelling. The important thing is the learning along the way. It will open doors you never knew existed. And you never know, you might just stumble into a community of other people who also want to see that idea come into the world.

Once you have an Unknown Project idea, you can start breaking it down into more manageable goals, or what I call Known Projects (projects with plans and an expected outcome). That first night at Noisebridge, when I splattered solder around like a kindergartener finger painting, is a perfect example. The event was billed as an “Introduction to Soldering and Electronics.” Those were skills I wanted to learn for the OpenROV project, so it put the experience into a larger context. At the beginning of the evening, we had to choose between three different kits, which are a particular type of Known Project. For me, choosing the portable phone charger kit was more relevant than the musical pen, but it really didn’t matter. Regardless of which project I chose, the more important aspects of the activity were learning how to manage a soldering iron and practicing attaching resistors to a circuit board. Hell, my phone charger barely worked!

In a class on angular sheet metal that I took at TechShop, we created an aluminum box. There were required tools and materials, as well as directions left by the makers who’ve come before. These types of Known Projects are great for your first stabs at the soldering iron or creating an aluminum flower box. All these Known Projects have helped me get comfortable with a number of different tools and processes: electronics, welding, laser cutting. And through them all, I inched closer to my goal of building an OpenROV.

With making, like everything in life, there are always constraints. Even when you have access to an incredible array of tools, like I did at TechShop, and the knowledge of how to use them, which I was gaining through classes and practice, there are always factors that constrain what you can make. Learning to work in that zone and expecting barriers, both known and unknown, is another hallmark of the maker mentality. During my first maker holidays, I decided I was going to make all my gifts; it was a perfect example of learning to work within those boundaries.

The first constraint I bumped up against was time; I didn’t have much of it. With only a week before the holiday, I quickly realized that my utopian idea of creating all my Christmas gifts was far too ambitious. I re-evaluated my plan and decided to lower my goal to just making a gift for my parents, mainly because they were still so confused about what I had been up to during the preceding months. The next combo of constraints was trying to find a gift in the sweet spot of something they would like and be impressed that I made, but also something I could actually make. After racking my brain to think of a gift in the center of that Venn diagram, I settled on creating a cribbage board shaped like the state of Minnesota (where they live). Cribbage is a card game where the score is kept on a pegged board. My parents love playing cribbage, and whenever I visit them it’s my favorite thing to do. I can play my mom and dad in cribbage for hours and not get tired of it. We sneak games in before dinner, in the morning while drinking coffee, or block off an entire night and play each other. I knew that the cribbage board would be a gift that looked great and would get a lot of use while highlighting just how much I’d learned.

Now, given that I was familiar with most of the machines in TechShop, one might assume that creating this cribbage board would be a simple, straightforward proposition for me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. It never is. No matter how clear the vision, the road to a completed project is bound to take a few unexpected turns.

The first step for me was deciding what material to use. I thought about making it out of acrylic plastic, because I had become really comfortable with using the laser cutter. This seemed like a good idea, until I checked in with TechShop and learned that the laser cutters were completely booked up for the next three days, which was all the time I had to complete the project. I took that setback as an opportunity to push myself to use the ShopBot, a CNC mill machine, and make the cribbage board out of wood.

The next step was creating the design I wanted to use. I found a shape of Minnesota online and added the necessary peg holes for the cribbage game. The design turned out to be the easy part. The harder part was taking the design and converting it to a cut file in the G-Code language that could be read and used by the machine. Because I was using the ShopBot, I was constrained to making sure my design was something the system could handle—it couldn’t have too many small details or sharp turns.

In addition to providing an outline of the design, the software also needs to tell the CNC machine how to cut—how fast to drill, where to start, how deep to go on each pass, etc. To figure out the right “feeds and speeds,” as they say in the shop, I needed to decide what size endmill (the cutting tip of the mill machine) I was going to use.

By the time I got to this point, I was pretty far out of my comfort zone. I had only used the ShopBot once before, during the basic use class under the watchful eye of an instructor. For safety’s sake, I thought it best to bring in a second opinion. I asked my trusted TechShop Dream Coach, Zack, to review my work so far, and help me decide on the right endmill to use. Zack suggested 1/4 inch for the state outline and 1/16 inch to drill the peg holes. But just as it seemed like everything was coming together, I encountered another hurdle: I had assumed that TechShop kept a stock of endmills that could be purchased (they did), but unfortunately they were out of 1/16 endmills. And because the holes were so specific, we couldn’t substitute a different size. Zack said he could order one, but it wouldn’t arrive for a few days, and I didn’t have any time to spare before my trip back to Minnesota.

As Zack and I discussed the potential solutions—none of which seemed very promising—we were interrupted by someone seated at the table next to us, Martin Horn. Martin and I had met before, frequently sharing projects and ideas whenever our paths crossed at TechShop. He had overheard our discussion about the endmill dilemma and had an idea that might solve the problem. Martin, besides being a part-time instructor at TechShop, is a wizard on the CNC machines. For starters, he helped us clarify the problem: TechShop had 1/16 inch drill bits, they just weren’t configured for the ShopBot. Zack and I nodded in agreement. He then suggested how we might modify one of the standard drill bits to work with the ShopBot by using a custom brass rod to hold a standard 1/16 inch drill bit. I wasn’t really sure what he meant, so I pressed him for a deeper explanation. Martin, confident in his idea and short on time to explain, replied, “C’mon, I’ll show you what I mean.”

Martin and I headed into the metal shop to test out his theory. We created it as he explained it: sawing off a portion of some spare brass rod Martin had tucked away (which seemed totally natural at the time, but now I’m kicking myself for not asking why he had it), drilling a 1/16th-inch hole through the center of the rod with the lathe, and using a hand saw to create a slit for compression around the drill bit. Throughout Martin’s detour, I couldn’t see the big picture of how this was going to work. However, as we went along and Martin’s vision began to take shape, I understood his plan. Pretty soon, we had a part that looked like it just might work. It was good enough to try, anyway. I brought the makeshift part back to show Zack. He spun it around in his hand, gave it a thorough look-over, and said the best thing a maker can hear: “You know what? This might just work. Let’s give it a shot.”

And so we did. I set up the ShopBot with our modified part, and away it drilled. It worked perfectly. After the entire board was cut, I was beaming with excitement. I eagerly ran back to show Zack and Martin. Their responses were similar: slightly happy, interested that our brass rod solution had worked, but mostly not surprised. Unlike the roller coaster of emotion that I’d experience—from excited to be making a gift, to disappointment that I couldn’t finish it, back to excitement and accomplishment—Zack and Martin were relatively unimpressed.

They were used to this experience. They had long since learned to embrace the unknowns of a project and relish the making do-ness of an imperfect but workable solution. Martin and Zack weren’t worried about the roadblocks. They took them as an opportunity to explore a different path. In fact, they loved the different path. After seeing the smile I couldn’t wipe off my face and the finished product in my hand, Martin said, “Pretty cool, right? I love that. It’s pretty cool to not only make the thing, but to make the tool you needed to make it.”

As I’ve come to learn, every project is a crooked path. With a maker mentality, the path is the fun part—every constraint is an opportunity to try something different.

I was really proud of my cribbage board gift for my parents—probably excessively so. After I made it, I couldn’t stop smiling for at least an hour. I carried it around and showed it to anyone one who would take the time to look. It wasn’t that difficult to make. In fact, anyone with a basic introduction to CNC machining could create the piece in a few hours of work. That didn’t faze me, though. The notion that an experienced machinist could make it with ease is trounced by the pride and fulfillment I get from seeing the cribbage board permanently displayed on my parents’ living room table.

Even though I was still learning to think like a maker—the persistent-tinkering mentality, openly sharing mistakes, and embracing the winding path—I could definitely feel the value of what I was doing. It meant a lot to me, regardless of how amateurish my outcomes were.

It turns out, there’s actually some science behind the value I perceived I was creating. A group of researchers led by Michael Norton, a professor at the Harvard Business School, published a paper in July of 2011 outlining a phenomenon they dubbed the IKEA Effect.^[11] The study sought to explore the relationship between labor and love; and how customers, builders, and makers who have put their own labor into a project value their own efforts. The first experiment used (not surprisingly) IKEA furniture to see whether or not the assembly of the product affected the customers valuation process. The study participants were split into two groups: builders and non-builders. The builders were given sets of IKEA furniture to assemble, whereas the non-builders were given completed sets that they could inspect. Later, they were asked to bid on their furniture. Not surprisingly, the builders tended to bid much more, an average of 63 percent higher.

After their initial test, Norton and his team modified the experiment to include other types of products in an effort to generalize the results. The next iteration used origami frogs and cranes, again separating the group into builders and non-builders. And again, they found the builders valued their own creations five times more than those of others! The team ran another variation of the experiment with LEGO kits, but this time had the builders and non-builders disassemble their kits after completion. They found that once the kits were taken apart, the builders and non-builders valued them equally. In other words, the IKEA Effect had dissipated once the kit was disassembled, even though the builders had valued it higher when it had been fully assembled moments earlier.

I can’t say the study surprised me. After spending so much time making projects like the Christmas cribbage board, it was easy for me to recognize my irrational attachment to my creations. The reasoning seemed obvious to me. Using traditional economics, however, I would have a hard time explaining my rationale. The traditional model suggests:

Finished Product Value = Materials/Parts Cost + Labor/Assembly Cost

Using that methodology, the IKEA Effect makes no sense: why would people pay more to provide labor? In the conclusion of the study, Norton and the team speculated as to why the builders, or makers in general, created this self-perceived value. Without making a definitive claim, they offer a number of speculative causes for the IKEA Effect. They speculate the feelings of ownership as a plausible cause, citing studies that show people feel ownership over things that are given to them as well as things they’ve spent time handling. That didn’t resonate with me. Again using my cribbage board as an example: I no longer had ownership of it, and never planned to retain it, but that didn’t change how valuable I thought it was.

The next series of explanations by the team seemed a little closer to home: the added value was created by the effort. The process of assembling the project and the positive feelings of accomplishment all get baked into a builder’s perception of value within the object. This seemed closer to my feelings, but there was still something missing.

For me, it wasn’t that difficult; I didn’t need a scientific study to confirm something I already knew. The added value of making something wasn’t a subconscious, self-projecting bias that I was unaware of. I knew I was getting a lot more out of it. In addition to getting the actual, physical thing, I also got the knowledge of how to put it together, of how it really worked, as well as a story of my making experience. When you buy something at the store or over the Internet, all you get is the thing:

Buying = Thing

Making = Thing + Learning + Story

When you look at the making process from this perspective, it’s easy to see why there’s so much more embedded value. For my cribbage board, I had a decent looking product—nothing that would drive a high price on eBay, but something I loved dearly. I gained more experience with the ShopBot and the CNC process. With Martin’s help, I learned how to modify the tools I needed to complete the project. And, perhaps most importantly, I have the story about making the cribbage board that my parents and I play on. My parents have a tangible piece of evidence that I wasn’t completely wasting my time trying to re-skill myself, and that I actually learned something.

Norton and his team noted that the IKEA Effect dissipated when the project wasn’t completed, meaning that if the builder wasn’t able to complete their project they didn’t attribute a higher valuation. I think that’s only part of the story. In my experience, unfinished or unsuccessful projects still hold a lot of value because the learning and story still accompany the process:

Buying (Fail) = Crappy Thing

Making (Fail) = Crappy Thing + Learning + Story

In fact, sometimes the learning and the story of a failed project become much more valuable than a successful project ever could have been. Take Thwaites’ Toaster Project for example. From an ability-to-toast-bread standpoint, the toaster project was a failure. In simple economic terms, the cost of the project could never compete with its store-bought inspiration. In Thwaites’ own words, “It took nine months, involved traveling 1,900 miles to some of the most remote places in the United Kingdom, and cost me ₤1,187.54 ($1,837.36). This is clearly a lot of time, effort, and money expended for just an electric toaster that didn’t work… an object that Argos sells for just ₤3.94 ($6.10).” However, another way of looking at Thwaites’ experience was to see him going on a wild adventure through the UK and getting a unique education in manufacturing interdependencies. He ended up with a story good enough to land him a book deal and numerous speaking engagements. And even though it doesn’t toast bread, he still has the toaster, which he plans to keep.

For those who harbor serious doubts about their creative abilities, like I did, I think there’s another important piece of advice that is sometimes overlooked: start drawing.

It might sound silly or irrelevant, but I think there’s something to it. Nearly every maker I’ve talked to has mentioned drawing as an important part of their process. Some of them have a specific pen or pencil that they love, and I’m no longer surprised to find them carrying a sketchbook for ideas. It was never a direct suggestion or piece of new maker advice, but it always bubbled up in my conversations and interviews with makers. Kent “The Tin Man” White mentioned it during my trip to his workshop in Nevada City, California. AnnMarie Thomas mentioned it in our conversation about her Maker Faire presentation “Making Future Makers.” In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford brings up his side interest in drawing (and includes many of his hand-drawn pictures in the book) which, if it weren’t for the recurring theme in my conversations, would have seemed otherwise irrelevant to the rest of his meditation on the experience of making things.

I’m not sure I would have noticed the undercurrent of drawing in the string of makers I met if it weren’t for the sketching course that I took through a community college a year prior. Before my desire to start making, I had a fear of drawing that I wanted to overcome. A pen in my hand and a blank piece of paper used to send shivers down my spine. Any time I’d try to draw anything, whether it was a map for directions, a diagram for something at work, or just a doodle while I was on the phone, the moment the pen started to run across the paper, I would mentally seize up with doubts about my creative talent. Even my stick figures made me cringe.

The course was a creative godsend. Every Saturday, I’d escape the typical routine of hovering over my laptop to the sanctuary of the Pasadena City College and the creative barrier-breaking activities that had been laid out by our instructor. I loved it. It wasn’t a typical art school drawing class because it was completely focused on sketching. I learned techniques to make quick, beautiful, proportional expressions of designs and ideas. The course started right where I needed it to—just letting the pen feel comfortable in my hand. We moved on to lines, then to shading, then to contour. The great part about being such a novice is that you’re able to make a lot of progress with just a few simple changes, which was a common theme for all the tools I would experiment with.

I still refer back to the book that guided the course curriculum, Rapid Viz (Cengage Learning, 2006), and block off hours of the week to work on my sketching. Not surprisingly, many makers I spoke to acknowledge a similar affinity to that book.

Speaking from personal experience, pushing myself to improve my sketching skills had two important effects:

Every morning I drink a kale smoothie. I throw a few leaves of kale, a banana, and coconut water into my Magic Bullet blender. It’s a delicious way for me to get more greens in my diet, even though everyone at the OpenROV office makes fun of me for being so “healthy.”

My teammates, especially Eric, hate the Magic Bullet. I’m really not sure why. I think it’s because, to them, it represents an obnoxious noise and a perpetually dirty dish around the office. As a product, I don’t care for it that much, either. It’s a fairly cheap, gimmicky, as-seen-on-TV machine that doesn’t actually work that well. And after a year of use, the Magic Bullet was really starting to show its age.

Like so many products in this day and age, it seems built to systematically fall apart as soon as it reaches the end of its warranty period (a concept known as “strategic obsolescence”). It is part of a class of products designed for a specific level of crappy, marrying cheap materials with shoddy handiwork. It seemed that they had run tests to find out how long it would be before a consumer would no longer consider the amount of money spent for the product worth arguing about, and then they designed the product to break at that exact moment.

And, we get what we pay for.

Sure enough, about a month outside the “Limited” One-Year Warranty, the Magic Bullet gave a mid-smoothie death growl and came to a screeching halt. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was in the OpenROV workshop by myself, writing this book. Despondent about losing my ability to drink kale smoothies, I wandered back to my computer and immediately brought up the Amazon page to see what a new Magic Bullet would cost. $49.99. And Amazon Prime could have it here by Tuesday.

But before I gave in to my weakest consumer instincts, I figured I’d try to fix it. At the very least, I’d take it apart to see how it really worked.

I picked up the device and twisted it around in my hands, trying to find the angle of attack. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to deconstruct a blender, or more specifically a Magic Bullet, but they don’t make it easy for you. So difficult is it, in fact, that I actually paused to wonder about the legality of trying to open it up. It felt like I was trying to break into Fort Knox.

Upon further examination, I finally found my way inside. I unscrewed and pulled apart as many pieces as I could, even though many of them seemed like they would never go back together. I laid them out on the table, step by step, leaving a trail that I hoped would guide me back to re-assembly. I was learning more about how the device worked as I peeled back each layer.

As soon as I had it all dismantled, Eric walked into the office. He looked curiously at me, huddled over the table with an array of screws and parts strewn about. I confessed, “The Bullet stopped working. I’m trying to fix it.”

“Dude, just get a new blender.” He replied and laughed. He walked over, surveyed my mess, and told me, “A great engineer always knows when it’s time to let something go.”

“No. I really think I can get this figured out.” I replied. And I really did believe that. Now that I had everything apart, I could see how the blender should have been working. I diagnosed the problem as a faulty spring that had corroded and stopped working. It seemed like the bad spring was preventing the motor from activating and the blender from turning on, but there was only one way to find out, so I switched it out.

I started to put the blender back together, steadily following the trail of parts that I had laid out. I wasn’t sure if my solution would fix the problem, but I was slightly more confident. Knowing how the blender worked gave me a new perspective on owning it. Somehow it became more valuable.

As I put the final screws in place (slightly surprised by how smooth the reassembly went), I called Eric back over for the moment of truth. I had a grin on my face, “I think I got it.”

He smiled, too, probably still doubting me. Then, with collectively held breaths, I pushed the blender down to turn it on. Nothing. I don’t know why, but for some reason I was expecting the blender to turn over like a car ignition that hadn’t been started in a while, slowly sputtering back to life. But there was nothing. Not even a click. Eric laughed and walked away.

Despondent, I began running through a mental checklist of what else could be wrong. And then I saw it. My fix and rebuild was a success in all ways but one: I forgotten to plug it in.

I plugged it back in, turned it on, and the Bullet let out a confident roar. Eric turned around, still laughing. A rookie mistake.

No matter how much I highlight the ways in which it’s getting easier for makers to get started, it still remains a challenge, given the realities of our daily lives. Market forces, like low prices and convenience, have created an arms race for product unfixability. It goes beyond just making it difficult to fix products, with many products actually prohibiting it. Admittedly, I had grown accustomed to the throw-away lifestyle. If something broke, oh well. The cost of replacement usually trumped the hassle of repair. It wasn’t until my maker journey that I truly recognized the cost of all the cheap (and unfixable) products in my life.

In the back of my Makers Notebook is a Maker Bill of Rights, as seen in Figure 3-1. It is based on the idea that “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”

Figure 3-1. The Maker Bill of Rights

Here are some tips and resources for developing a “Fix it First” mentality: