So, here's a thought: some of our start-up equipment can (and probably should) be donated by users.

With that in mind, here's MY list of what I'm willing to put up, up front:
Miter saw
Router + router table
Old-ish PC (800 MHz, 384MB, 80gb HD)- but still perfectly capable of surfing the web, working on documents, light picture editing, and writing simple programs
Serial programmer for PIC
Serial programmer for Atmel AVR- with this, you can program bare AVR chips with the Arduino bootloader, so you can develop your project with the Arduino core into any hardware you like
Assorted electronic parts- I have a stock of LEDs, motors, 12V 1A wall warts, and other crap I've been saving but not using. The company I work for throws a lot of stuff away that I hate seeing go to waste, so I'd be diverting some of that waste stream to our venture- PCBs, PC power supplies, things like that. It'll be win-win, since they pay by the pound for disposal.
A desk- not a great one, but sturdy and capable of taking a beating, with quite a bit of workspace.
Time- My work has a pretty well stocked machine shop, so if we decided to make a Reprap, I could fabricate some of the parts needed there, as well as anything else we might need.

I have a 1960's vintage Sears Craftsman metal lathe in my garage that I can't use because
there's too much crud piled in front of it. I'd love to see it have a nice home where I could
come use it on occasion.

i can probably come up with old institutional desks, tables, storage, and chairs. once we get a location settled, i'll really start digging around.

I just discovered that a hackerspace is being developed in my fair city, I LOVE IT!

I work in IT for a smallish company in burnsville and I control what we throw away and when.

I have a decent pile of random electronics and computers that could use a good home.

Some Dell Desktops, a few CRT's, many printers I have been saving for parts, countless power supplies and some other random stuff.

I would be glad to donate them to such an honorable cause.



Oh and I have many used office chairs I could probably donate too. Geeks gotta swivel!

I also control outbound computeing equitment i bet i can get some ok hardware donated.

Sounds great! We would just need a space to store all of it. Can you come to the Wed meetings? We'd love to meet you!

dhell makes computers? i thought they were a distributor for bad capacitors?

next business meeting we'll be going over by-laws, we should probably set up a methodology for accepting donated gear as well, someone mentioned it before that we're not going to want *everyone's* old circ saws. of course knowing what we all have to donate is key to figuring out what we will need/want to acquire via other means.

maybe add names on the wiki list of tools to folks who have and are willing to donate them? of course this wouldn't be hard and fast, but it'd give us an idea of what we've potentially got and are entirely missing.

...or obsolete office PCs.

hey rambus is $$$ these days. i could use a pair of old 512s, but don't want to get a second mortgage.

and while most of it is functionally scrap, we could build a decent data server out of slow small hdds. not efficient, but i dont' see us needing a lot of storage either. ribbon cables and power supplies are nice though. heck old hdds are great for the magnets....

And the cases are passable sources of scrap sheet metal. And floppy drives and CD drives have nice little motors in them. And inkjet printers are one axis of motion for a Reprap.