I Joined Freeside in 2017, but had known about it years earlier from a friend who'd paid the space a visit in its earlier days. One of my favorite things about the place is how much of a careful and wonderful hodgepodge it can be. When I give open house tours I often end the tour with the belt sander near the forging area. 

Our belt grinder is a self-built machine and a terribly useful bit of tooling that's not something you can pick up from any old tool store. When I joined, it's drive motor was harvested from some smallish blower fan, connected through a set of pulleys, gas shocks, and linkages that would have brought a tear to the eye of Rube Goldberg himself. It was underpowered, crookedly welded, the rollers sported clapped-out skateboard bearings, and it was all screwed down to some random chipboard.

Being as it was in poor shape, and I happened to work repairing gym equipment at the time I scrounged a used beefy treadmill motor, A couple other members cobbled together a rough DC supply to feed it, and we tied it together with a variac to control the speed of it all (LA FAWNSEH!).

Over the years it's become something of a Ship of Theseus with hardly more than some of it's original frame intact, and even that's been reworked some. Occasionally it runs smoother, occasionally it breaks down and needs some love to keep going, or throws sparks all over the place and makes a hell of a noise and mess, but it wouldn't exist without so many people tinkering with it and throwing the ability they can bring into keeping it going.

So when is a Hackerspace like a belt grinder? In our case I'm thankful to say "basically always".