Do-it-yourselfers gather for Maker Faire

Let’s say the handle breaks off your gas grill and the manufacturer won’t sell you another handle for less than $49, plus shipping.

What? $49? For $1.25 worth of plastic?

You can draw the thing, with the proper hex-shaped aperture for the spindle and the threaded hole for the adjustable bolt. All you need is somebody with rendering software and a 3-D printer to make it.

But unless you are Reed Richards, you don’t have either of those tools in your Fantastic Four garage. Luckily you belong to a Maker group, and those devices are readily available to you. And while you’re at your Makers space, crafting your new handle, you can bring in your thumb plane to help a buddy who is building a spice rack.

Combining skills, pooling resources, getting together to build fun stuff — and perhaps contributing to the next Industrial Revolution — that’s part of the Maker movement.

This weekend, Atlanta will host a Maker Faire, welcoming 215 Maker groups from as far away as India and Australia to downtown Decatur for a two-day outdoor event expected to draw 15,000 visitors.

There are a half-dozen Maker groups around Atlanta, from the edgy Freeside group housed in a West End warehouse (where members recently built an off-road wheelchair) to Geekspace Gwinnett and the fledgling Maker Station off the square in Marietta. In Georgia, the trend seems to be gaining momentum.

Dozens of Maker Faires are hosted around the country each year by such groups, but this is the first year that Atlanta’s fair will be big enough to become a “featured” fair. That means it will receive significant promotion from Make: Magazine, the do-it-yourself bible that kick-started the Maker movement.

Previously held on the Georgia Tech campus, the Maker Faire Atlanta outgrew those surroundings this year. It is the biggest such event in the Southeast, and also the only fair of its size that isn’t charging admission; it is supported by volunteers, the city of Decatur and corporate sponsorships.

The Decatur Makers group, housed in the old gymnasium behind the First Christian Church of Decatur, meets blocks away from the fair’s venue, and members of the group were busy on a recent Sunday evening preparing some of the group’s projects for showtime.

Group founder Lew Lefton, who teaches math at Georgia Tech, tinkered with a Rubens’ Tube, a kind of oscilloscope that represents musical frequencies using columns of flame.

Against one wall of the renovated building were the component parts of a human-size foosball table. Brian Taylor, of Stone Mountain, a mechanic with Perimeter College, stopped by with his daughter Ava to offer help. Taylor said his ambition at the Decatur space is to create an underwater remote camera that he can install in his fish pond. “I’ve been dying to see what those fish are doing during the day.”

Ava, 9, hopes to create a robot that will clean up her room. (While most Maker spaces are geared toward adults, Decatur’s is focused on adults and children. On this evening, Ava is joined by Connor Dooley, 16, who is looking for advice on crafting an electric guitar, while his brother, Callum Dooley, 12, wants to build a laptop. The Maker Faire Atlanta also will have a full complement of booths and activities suited to children.)

The Decatur group has accumulated some nifty tools, including a laser cutter and a metal shop, but the strength of the group is its collective skill set, Lefton said. “This is not about the technology. It’s about getting together and making stuff.”

The groups that will open booths at the Maker Faire Atlanta and discuss and demonstrate their products and projects include a fanciful mix of entrepreneurs and hobbyists:

There’s the Atlanta Robot Fight Club; the Lock Pick Village (a Jacksonville, Fla.-based lock-picking collective); re:loom (a clothing reweaving and recycling group); the Nerdy Derby (a Pinewood Derby for grown-ups), the Roller Coaster Project (which builds miniature wooden roller coasters); Electric Bubblegum, makers of electric-powered skateboards that can fly at 23 mph; blacksmiths; glass blowers; and the creators of a programmable inkjet device that prints circuits in liquid silver.

Most of these presenters had their beginnings in humble, DIY environments like this church gym.

Lefton said people long to move away from their computer screens and interact with one another, and Maker spaces offer that contact. “There’s a thirst for this,” he said. Some 130 came to the Decatur group’s open house in June, and the members have pitched in to tear out moldy paneling, nail on a new roof and walls and upgrade the building’s HVAC and electrical systems.

Individuals pay $25 a month ($50 a month for families) to belong to the collective, which gives them access to the space.

Some economists believe that indie manufacturing, and online marketing on such sites as eBay and Etsy, can substantially change product development in this country.

President Barack Obama sponsored a Maker Faire at the White House earlier this summer, and called on the nation’s creative leaders to help the country become “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”

David Sluder, executive producer of the Maker Faire Atlanta, said the Maker movement “has the potential to be revolutionary. … It is a new and groundbreaking concept, that Joe Schmoe, in his house, on his computer, could create the next big thing.”