At 2025 Washington Ave., on a wide South Philly street lined with stone and pipe dealers, crews have spent the last two months laying concrete footings, installing heating, cooling, and ventilating equipment, soundproofing, wiring, winching, piping, and preparing to install computer-controlled plasma cutters, lathes, grinders, robotic painters, 3D printers, and other cutting-edge machines, for an inventors' dream workshop. Its owners hope it will revive Philadelphia manufacturing for digital times. They're building the second NextFab - five times larger, at 21,000 square feet, than Penn and Cornell grad Evan Malone's original four-year-old machine-and-design center at the University City Science Center in West Philadelphia. This new NextFab will open next month, if Peco Energy gets the 3,000-volt switchgear hooked up in time and the big machines all arrive on schedule through the trailer-high doors and docks.
To read the original article: PhillyDeals: Inventors' workshop expands to S. Phila.
