NASHUA – One of the city’s more unusual institutions, the first makerspace to open in New Hampshire, may move into bigger space and take on some of the roles of an incubator for startup businesses, if it can get enough money to repair vandalism that has occurred at a long-empty building owned by the city.

“Every time we do a walkthrough, there’s another chunk of something missing,” said Adam Shrey, president of MakeIt Labs, concerning the former Armstrong Cabinets building on Crown Street, where MakeIt Labs hopes to move. “The last time, vandals had destroyed a heater/cooling unit to get the condenser out of it. A thousand dollars worth of damage to get 50 dollars worth of metal.”

Nashua bought the 25 Crown St. parcel, covering 7 acres as well as the office building, showroom and warehouse, for $1.425 million in 2013 to construct a future park-and-ride facility should passenger rail be extended north from Lowell. The buildings, parts of which date back a century or more, have been empty since Armstrong Cabinets moved out in 2014.

The proposed contract would rent the space to MakeIt Labs for $100,000 total over five years, conditional on the non-profit makerspace collecting about $30,000 needed to fix up the buildings and move from their current home, two buildings away.

The contract went to the Board of Aldermen for consideration on Friday.

Gyms for geeks

MakeIt Labs is an open-access community workshop, full of equipment ranging from laser cutters to soldering irons to a 3-D printer to an auto lift, all available for use by members who pay a monthly fee. It’s an example of the makerspace or hackerspace movement, which mixes do-it-yourself independence with tool-wielding camaraderie, providing equipment plus expertise and community to create what are sometimes called gyms for geeks.

MakeIt Labs opened in 2011 in a former foundry at 23 Crown St., part of a ramshackle industrial area near the Merrimack River, as the state’s first makerspace. Since then a separate makerspace has opened in Portsmouth and another is starting in Keene. There’s also one in Lowell, Mass., and many Boston-area communities.

With 80 members, MakeIt Labs is thriving and has filled its current 6,000-square-foot space, Shrey said, making it hard to hold many public classes and expand services. So the group jumped at the chance when the city approached it about renting a much larger building – 15,700 square feet plus a 4,000-square-foot basement – just up the street.

The new location would also be much more visible. MakeIt Lab’s current space can only be approached from the back of the building, via a muddy, unpaved parking area next to railroad tracks.

“When we have an open house, people call and say ‘I can’t find the place. I’m out in front of Armstrong Cabinets, where are you?’ ” said Shrey.

Coworking options

Just as importantly, the new buildings would contain separated office space and a former showroom that could be used for more formal work beyond the “clubhouse” atmosphere that is key to makerspaces, allowing for more tours and public classes – MakeIt Labs already holds classes on everything from operating welders to picking locks.

“Right now, I might be trying to teach the laser-cutter class and somebody’s using the angle grinders working on cars, 20 feet away. That makes it hard,” Shrey said.

Furthermore, it could even expand into having official “coworking or technology incubator-type areas,” said Shrey. Like many makerspaces, MakeIt Labs is already used by some small companies that can’t afford their own machines shops to build prototypes.

Even if aldermen approve the lease, however, the move is still contingent on money. MakeIt Labs has been a bootstrapped operation from the start, with no real sponsorship or corporate support, and is run entirely by volunteers. Shrey, for example, works for Durridge, a Massachusetts developer and manufacturer of radon detection equipment.

The group needs to raise about $30,000 to lock down the buildings so that more vandalism can’t occur, then fix the problems and move. The contract gives them a month’s leeway to determine whether that’s feasible, said Shrey.

“Because of the thieves and vandals, who have stolen all the copper, we have to redo plumbing, portions of the electric,” he said.

Nashua originally wanted to have rent cover the $30,000 annual tax bill, but because of the damage that has been cut back somewhat. The proposal calls for $10,000 rent the first year, a figure that would rise $5,000 each year for five years – making a total of $100,000. That’s lower than the current rent, said Shrey.

“Over the course of the lease we will definitely have enough money to pay for what we need to do, based on membership and rates. The problem is getting it up front,” he said.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531, dbrooks@nashua
telegraph.com or @GraniteGeek.