By Kalena Reynolds | Staff Writer
Located on 1211 Webster Ave., the Maker’s Edge Makerspace has been a hub of creativity for the people of Waco and Baylor students for 10 years. With an array of tools and stations available, the space encourages everyone from children to seniors to stop by, assisting with creative endeavors.
Maker’s Edge was founded by Rick and Melissa Pardun to provide a creative space for the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) community to develop prototypes.
Rick and Melissa are “DIY-ers” to their core and have a strong love of combining “thinking with doing,” as Melissa said. When Rick and Melissa got married, they even built their house with their own hands.
“Day one we cleared the land,” Melissa said. “We bought the land. He learned how to drive a bulldozer. I learned how to drive a backhoe. So he cleared the land with the trees, and then I dug all the lines and laid the lines for the sewer system. We’ve always enjoyed the idea of doing it ourselves. Why hire someone to do it?”
Because of the fond memories the power couple created through their various projects, they found a desire to bring their self-starter and experimental expertise to the citizens of Waco and Baylor through a maker space.
“We wanted to figure out how we could actually involve Baylor from the very start,” Rick said. The very first interesting meeting we had about opening our space was on campus and it was a bunch of the leadership of the different student organizations, mostly centered around engineering, kind of sat in a room and just brainstormed with this about what kind of tools they would like to see in a space like this.”
While Rick’s day job includes working in the aerospace industry as an engineer, his wife Melissa, who has her masters degree in training and development communication from Baylor, ended up taking an entrepreneurship class at Baylor prior to the opening to be able to successfully run and open the makerspace.
“Bradley Norris, he had a class at that time on entrepreneurship, and so I took that class and really honed my sales pitch and my business plan, and went to the banks and found a backer, and just things kind of took off,” Melissa said. “Then in that 12-month period that we were working on it, it went from just an idea to breaking ground and opening doors.”
While the maker space is a great place for engineering and art students to find tools for their projects, it offers an extensive range of tools that are open to people of all ages and experience levels. The space also offers classes for every tool and station so that everyone, regardless of project size or experience level, has the opportunity to use these products.
“We’ve got a metal working area with a vertical mill and metal lathe,” Rick said. “An area with mostly woodworking tools and work benches. We’ve got a pottery area, which is set up for wheel work and flat work. We also have a kiln on site and teach glazing and firing as well. Then we’ve got some digital fab tools like desktop CNC router, 3D printers, resin printer and our laser cutter. And then our newest tool in the space is a CNC water [jet cutter].”
While the couple originally thought the space would attract business professionals like Rick, they shortly discovered that the main people utilizing it were those who were earlier in their career journeys.
“It really took us being open for about six months to realize that was not our target audience,” Melissa said. “Our target audience was really the lower socioeconomic people who couldn’t afford the tools or people who had no idea if they wanted to learn how to make or not, but they wanted to try. And that became the younger crowd, the college-age or the newly married.”
While a Maker’s Edge membership is currently $89 per month, they have a student discount that brings it down to $60. In collaboration, Moody Makerspace also offers one free pass a semester for students to use at Maker’s Edge.
