JukeShop Waterjet Fund

Hi, I'm Patrice Mackey aka Chef Juke and I run the JukeShop, a small makerspace in Eugene, Oregon.

 

The focus of the Jukeshop is to provide access to woodworking, machining and fabrication tools and a workspace for regular folks to help them in their creative projects as well as acting as an incubator to help beginning fabricators and machinists develop their skills and ability to start their own businesses.

 

The JukeShop is basically a small home-based shop with dreams of moving into a larger commercial space to provide more access to the larger community.

 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/JukeShop

 

Recently, in an effort to provide the shop with a great tool to add to our makerspace with the hopes of using the tool to generate income to help fund the move to a bigger space, we tried to purchase a used Wazer desktop waterjet (www.wazer.com) from a facebook marketplace ad. While we thought we had vetted the seller sufficiently, in the end, we did not and as a result, ended up losing $3,000 in this "purchase".  While this experience totally sucked and we're certain to be more cautious in the future, the biggest disappointment wasn't so much the money lost, but more the loss of the benefit to the shop and our little community of makers.

 

This fundraiser is to ask for support to help us achieve that original goal of obtaining a Wazer waterjet for the shop to allow us to move forward with our plans to add the tool to our makerspace and help us generate funds to move to a larger shop.

 

As the price of these machines is going up in the near future, our hope is to raise the funds by end of January. To purchase and ship a new Wazer and basic accessories (and cover GoFundMe fees), the total needed is $9,500.  We have already received a generous donation from one of our shop mates so the remainder we're looking to raise is $,8 000.  We know this is a big chunk of change, and we commit that a significant portion of the use time of the tool will be for projects that benefit our local and broader arts community.

 

I've spent a large portion of the last 7 years building this shop with the focus of helping others be able to build their projects and dreams as well as offer classes on welding and other skills so people could become proficient in building, fixing, making and otherwise creating more of the things in their world.

 

My shopmates and I would be incredibly grateful for your support.

 

Sincerely,

Patrice aka Chef Juke

Eugene, Oregon