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Wood & Metal
Bench joinery, lathe work, light fabrication. Repairing furniture, building jigs, turning bowls, and the occasional ambitious dovetail. Tools shared, swarf shared more.
A workshop, a bench, a bring-and-fix.
For makers, menders, coders & curious folk on the windward edge of England.
We are a loose confederation of woodworkers, electronics builders, software people, machinists, retired engineers, students and the merely curious — meeting on a damp Thursday in a back room with too many extension leads and not enough biscuits. We build things. We break things. We help one another get unstuck.
Bench joinery, lathe work, light fabrication. Repairing furniture, building jigs, turning bowls, and the occasional ambitious dovetail. Tools shared, swarf shared more.
From breadboard to PCB. Bring something that doesn't work yet. Members contribute scope time, hot-air rework, and patience.
Microcontroller workshops, Linux on tiny things, Rust for the brave, MicroPython for the rest. We talk about LLMs, sometimes.
Enclosures, brackets, broken-thing replacements. Bring a CAD file or a sketch on the back of an envelope; we'll make it real.
Homelab show-and-tell. Proxmox, Tailscale, mesh networking, self-hosted everything. The cloud is just somebody else's bench.
The collection corner. Z80s, BBC Micros, Psion organisers, valve radios. We restore them, document them, and occasionally turn them on.
The Bridge Inn back room, second and fourth Thursdays of the month. We start at 19:30 and run until the landlord meaningfully gestures at the clock. Beginners are warmly welcome — we were all beginners once, and most of us still are at something.
If you can't make it in person, we have a Matrix room and a low-traffic mailing list. Both equally tolerant of half-formed questions.