Reigniting Sparqs

by D.C. Denison
October 04, 2005

The biggest DIY project at Sparqs has ended.

The email went out to members on the first of this month. After a hopeful-sounding subject line ("Sparqs to Transform"), the news was grim: founder Tim Panagos is shutting the place down, after just six months of operation.

When MAKE stopped by the club a few times late last summer, Panagos was guardedly optimistic about prospects for his "Industrial Arts Club" and was clearly hoping that winter would inspire nearby New Englanders to crank up the kind of projects that needed the "extreme DIY" resources that Sparqs offered.

However, unexpectedly high start-up costs and a steep monthly rent sapped his funds before the first cold snap.

Significantly, Panagos is still interested in pursuing the idea as a "virtual" organization. In an email to MAKE, he said he's hoping the club can use "other people's facilities to do classes and workshops for a while--like a rave for makers."

Let's hope that Sparqs can morph. In the meantime, MAKE's story about Sparqs, which was to appear in an upcoming issue, gives a snapshot of the Sparqs that inspired Panagos.

-- D.C. Denison

It's only a few minutes after sunset, but the sprawling industrial park in suburban Boston is already dozing off to sleep. The wholesale bakers are long gone, and the construction company is dark. Crickets are chirping in the mundane bushes that frame the deserted parking lot.

But follow the banging sounds around to the back of one of the concrete buildings, and you may be surprised to encounter a bustle of activity coming from the other side of a half-opened garage door. A lot of hammering and grinding is going on in there; bright, efficient-looking fluorescent light is spilling out onto a banged-up loading dock.

If it looks like an after-hours machine shop, or a DIY nite spot, neither is far from the truth: you've found the Sparqs Industrial Arts Club, a five-month-old facility with a mission to mix people and shop tools in the interest of creativity, invention, modification, and fabrication.

Founder Tim Panagos says the club's attitude is "Extreme DIY," and when I stopped by this well-stocked machine shop/wood shop/social club on a few recent evenings, I found a number of projects that lived up to his label.

One large, startling work-in-progress was a "buscycle," a bus that is designed to run entirely on the energy produced by pedaling passengers. Coming together on the bed of a 1989 Dodge box van, now sheared of its top, the buscycle was usually surrounded by a small swarm of artists and bike nuts, welding and twisting wrenches. It occupied the main stage in the shop, except when it was being pushed around the empty parking lot on tentative test runs.

A number of smaller projects were also in residence. Dan Grunberg and son Ted, 14, were leaning into a variety of tools around the edges of the shop. Dan was using the MIG welder and plasma cutter to fashion a firebox for a custom BBQ smoker. So far, he's put about three weeks of free time into the pursuit of this "perfect smoker."

"I've got lots of ideas about temperature and moisture," he said. "If you make a smoker yourself, you understand it better."

Son Ted was hanging out at the milling machine, making a motor mount and a bearing mount for a new battlebot. His previous bot, "Scrambled Eggs," finished third in a local competition, and he's got some ideas on how to improve his showing next time.

"I'm going to create a stiffer frame," he said. "My first frame got kind of bent in the last competition."

Ted said his new bot will also "have a weapon with a longer reach... so it can hit my opponent before he can hit me."

The largest and most ambitious undertaking at Sparqs, however, is the meta project that consumes founder Tim Panagos: how to create a Sparqs model that will be self-sustaining, maybe even profitable and reproducible. So far, he's finding it a daunting challenge.

A former software engineer with a graduate degree in the management of technology from MIT, Panagos taught himself welding in his garage a few years ago and began dreaming of a shop like the MIT shop he frequented when he was a grad student. Later, when he couldn't find a facility to tinker with some robotic ideas, he started planning Sparqs. The name, and the yellowy orange logo, are inspired "by the sparks that hot metal throws off when you're welding," he says.

The idea was that small businesses and inventors would use the facility during the day, with hobbyists frequenting on weekends and at night. A solid premise, still. But Panagos' concept has been expensive to implement. So far, he's spent $120,000 on equipment like plasma cutters, welding rigs, and table saws. He's sunk an additional $120,000 into his shop's infrastructure: electricity, cooling, ventilation, etc.

Now, a little more than a year after starting the project (Sparqs opened April 1, 2005 after six months of work), Panagos is anxiously fine-tuning his vision, hoping that the considerable buzz he's created among Boston-area hardware hackers will cover his costs. His latest revenue model relies on a number of membership plans, from $59 to $99 a month, along with a variety of a la carte options. The summer, he admits, wasn't as busy as he had projected, but he has high hopes for the late fall and winter, when New Englanders tend to get industrious.

Certainly, as he strolls among his impressive collection of equipment in the Woburn, Mass., facility, including a 1946-era Bridgeport vertical mill and a 1956 Yale forklift, Panagos' idealism remains intact.

"I really think we're overdue for the return of the citizen engineer," he says. "I'd like to encourage people to think of the world as malleable, instead of accepting it as passive consumers."

If he gets the model right, Panagos believes that a nationwide chain of Sparqs is possible.

"Every major metropolitan area should have one of these," he declares.

But he admits that Sparqs may need some adjusting, maybe even a radical reconception, before that can happen. On a whiteboard in his spartan office, next to plans for a homebrew biodiesel rig, Panagos has drawn a Venn diagram that captures some of the options if cash flow does not meet expectations. Among them: move to a smaller space, get a good-paying software job and hire a shop manager, bring in an investor, and, most adventurous: "go virtual."

"The idea there would be that a community of members would each host one segment of this place," he explains. "One member can host the woodworking shop in his basement, another could host the welding rigs. Members could move around to the different spaces, depending on their projects."

Adventurous thinking, obviously, is not a problem for Panagos. So as he sits in his office one late summer night, oblivious to the banging of the busycle crew on the other side of the wall, it's not surprising that Panagos is doggedly confident that he can make Sparqs fly.

"The strength of this place is that it throws interesting people into an environment that enables them to act," he says, perhaps speaking of his own Big Project, in addition to the ones his members are working on.

"If you can reconnect Americans with the creative side of themselves," Panagos says finally, "good things will happen."

---

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