HatchSpace Members Innovate to Expand Access to Winter-Ready Windows
On Tuesday, Nov. 12 from 5pm to 9pm at the Winston Prouty Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, a team of HatchSpace members will test a new design of production templates that are poised to expand access to low cost and high efficiency window inserts. WindowDressers, a Maine based non-profit, has been making the inserts available to homeowners, renters, and small businesses alike every year since 2010, assembling them through volunteer-based “Community Build” events. With the HatchSpace team’s intervention, the hopeful result is to have more homeowners, renters, and small businesses that can enjoy lower heating costs and warmer climates indoors while simultaneously fighting climate change outdoors.
HatchSpace member and WindowDressers volunteer, Tim Kieschnick of Brattleboro, VT, first saw the opportunity when realizing that the current production templates, which are also called jigs, were being hand fashioned by one individual, and made of materials that overtime could loosen, break or need replacing. There was no good method to make jigs easily repeatable, which also meant that the number of Community Builds was limited by the number of jig sets available, ultimately controlling the number of window inserts put into the hands of homeowners, renters or small business owners.
prototypes of the production jigs are laid out for study on the bed of HatchSpace’s Phantom CNC machine.
That’s where the HatchSpace team has entered. Tim believed that the resources and community of innovative problem-solvers at HatchSpace might be able to come up with a better solution to the jig set problem, and thereby get more window inserts into the homes and buildings across our region. He assembled a group of members with the goal of designing an easily repeatable and durable jig set, a design problem that felt perfect for the suite of tools available to them through the CNC Shop at HatchSpace. CNC means “computer numeric control”, and in simple terms, is a computer system that controls a cutting tool, telling it to cut forward, backward, or up and down, and how fast or slow to go along a line or tool path designed in a computer software program called Fusion 360. Rather than having an individual person build and customize each set of jigs by hand, the team has endeavored to create designs that can be fabricated on a CNC machine and 3D Printer with ease.
We’re pleased to relay that this year, the Brattleboro Community Build that is being hosted at the Winston Prouty Center will also be testing new jigs that were created by the HatchSpace team. Hopefully, this test will lead to collaborative production of more sets of jigs, enabling the program to expand to more communities in future years.
Please stop by the Winston Prouty Center on Tuesday, Nov 12 from 5-9pm to learn about WindowDressers and the work the HatchSpace team is leading. For more information about WindowDressers, or to order inserts for your own windows next year, go to windowdressers.org.