The Salad Prototype Lab
The Salad prototype lab is like the batcave without the campy acting nor a butler. Darn about the butler; we need a robot butler that can make cold brew coffee.
Why does Salad have a prototype lab you ask. There is no substitute to the visceral qualities of an object in hand. Does the heft feel right? Is the scale good? How easy or hard is it to assemble? Does the contact cement just smell bad? Is the variation in the finish coat too much or not enough? Do we need to change from a dye to a stain? Did that idea for filling the wood grain with teeth whitening charcoal powder work? And after all those considerations we put the prototype in our living space. Does it work in a room? Is it too distinctive or not distinctive enough? And of course does it function as we intended.
What is in the Salad prototype lab? The space is dominated by a ShopSabre CNC router. It is ultra precise and has auto tool change. It kicks ass. We have an electronics area. Need an LED for an amp? We have lots. Power supply? We have them too. The 3D printer is a recent addition. It is a fast and easy way to prototype. Unfortunately and fortunately prototyping leads to collecting many bits of hardware that we do not ultimately use right away. The good part is we have so much stuff on-hand that it really hastens the prototyping process. We have a bin with a variety of springs. An amazing amount of fasteners. So many magnets and latches. Amplifier boards, cables, wires, speaker drivers, and subwoofer drivers. That mason jar speaker system did not sound great but we have the cute little speaker driver when we need it.
Not all prototypes require CNC equipment. When they don’t, we have our hand-tool area in the lab. Grab an old Miller Falls eggbeater drill to get the job done. The beautifully tuned #4 smoothing plane will leave a finish so smooth that you'll wonder if sandpaper is a scam.
We support the lab with stock mostly kept in a separate building. Sapele and baltic birch plywoods are mainstays as is solid alder. We stock all sorts of aluminum. Acrylic sheets as well as polycarbonate are on-hand. Need, say a little ebony or koa for a custom knob? We have some.
The prototype batcave lab is a core part of the Salad ethic. Make a prototype, evaluate it, make it better, and do it over and over. Yes, it is costly and time consuming but it is the only way to do it. Within the batcave is a world of opportunity and we would not have it any other way.
-Matt
