Welcome

We’re building a permanent endowment to offer annual internships/student co-ops at Sector67, if you’d like to contribute please contact us for more information or donate here. An anonymous donor has stepped up to match funds so we’re very proud to announce a 2 to 1 match up to $200,000 contributed to our endowment! Every dollar you donate turns into $3 that will support our internship program expenses forever into the future.

Interested? Apply now

We’ll be reviewing applications starting April 15th, 2026, applicants should not expect to hear from us until late April.

Opportunity:
Sector67 has a very wide variety of ongoing projects. Interns are welcome to assist with building construction, tool construction/refurbishment, website/backend updates, plan/teach classes, manage social media, grow the Madison Tool Library, etc. It’s up to you to bring your passions and motivation, this opportunity is intentionally flexible to align to your interests.

Requirements:
Sector67 is hosting up to two paid internships:
Must have a reliable way to get here (or motivation to use our shop to make your transportation reliable)
Open to anyone 16 years or older
No experience necessary, enthusiasm to learn required

Program Window:
10 week minimum commitment – starting summer 2026
Hours are flexible but will be agreed upon ahead of time
Minimum commitment of 10 hours/week but you should target closer to 20 hours on average

Payment:
$2500 stipend
Temporary housing in Madison may be available

This year we are celebrating 15 years of creativity and inspiration at Sector67. One of the projects to celebrate that milestone is a 7’x4′ photomosaic of the space created from 1,100+ member-submitted pictures of people doing amazing things at Sector67 over the years. From a distance, it may appear that Sector67 is defined by its walls and tools, but the true foundation of Sector67 lies in its community: innovators, makers, and collaborators whose creativity and energy give meaning to the space. This mosaic captures that and is both a portrait of a place when viewed from afar and a celebration of the people who have transformed it into something extraordinary when you get close to it.

The image was created using the freely-available AndreaMosaic software package.

Stop by the shop to check out the mosaic up close. Sector67 is open to the public the first Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. for our monthly meeting. Not only can you see the new mosaic, you can see (or give) presentations of creative activity, meet members of our community, and get a tour of the space.

Despite the name, we’re open to anyone joining the team but the past 5 seasons have been East High School students 🙂  All of our students graduated last year and our excellent student advisor Ms. Chin retired so we’re hoping casting a wider net will find interested high school age students – if you know anyone interested please have them e-mail team AT sector67 DOT org or give us a ring 608 241 4605 (it’s a land line with no answering machine don’t try to send a text).

What’s the competition?  FIRST is an international robotics competition with 3 tiers of competitions – FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge (this team), and FIRST Robotics Competition.  Typically joining a team has a cost, we have sponsors and grants to cover all expenses for all students, there is no cost to participate.  The competition is in Madison on January 31st, 2026

This year the students need to move balls around the course and shoot them into a corner, should be an interesting season! The team last year left a working robot chassis and software to work from but the autonomous routine will have to be reworked and most of the chassis built to make the robot suitable for this competition:

This completely free event will take place on November 1st from 2:30PM-5:30PM
56 Corry St, Madison, WI 53704

Microsoft just ended support for Windows 10. If your computer doesn’t meet Windows 11 system requirements, don’t throw it away! Instead, bring it to us for a free upgrade to a modern Linux OS! Save yourself the cost of purchasing a new computer while saving your device from becoming e-waste.

More info at https://madisonlinux.com/

Swing by for the neighborhood block party on Saturday September 20th to listen to talented, local, live musicians. Potluck / BYOB, drop by whenever you’d like.

We’re also celebrating 15 years of Sector67! From the initial business plan presentation at the UW Business Plan Competition to today has been a long road. . .

If you’d like to sign up to perform feel free to reach out, we’ll post the lineup here a couple days before the party.

Special thanks to Ms. Chin for the motivation to reboot the East High School FIRST Tech Challenge team this year! We thank Apple (through FIRST), FIRST Rookie Team grants, WI Department of Public Instruction, Applied Research Associates and Mark for their funding to purchase all of the hardware/electronics necessary and cover the competition fees.

We’ll be headed to the rookie competition in Brookfield, WI on Sunday – wish us luck!

We’re building a permanent endowment to offer annual internships/student co-ops at Sector67, if you’d like to contribute please contact us for more information or donate here.

Interested?  Apply now

We’ll be reviewing applications starting April 15th, 2025, applicants should not expect to hear from us until late April.

Opportunity:
Sector67 has a very wide variety of ongoing projects. Interns are welcome to assist with building construction, tool construction/refurbishment, website/backend updates, plan/teach classes, manage social media, grow the Madison Tool Library, etc. It’s up to you to bring your passions and motivation, this opportunity is intentionally flexible to align to your interests.

Requirements:
Sector67 is hosting up to two paid internships:
Must have a reliable way to get here (or motivation to use our shop to make your transportation reliable)
Open to anyone 16 years or older
No experience necessary, enthusiasm to learn required

Program Window:
10 week minimum commitment – starting summer or fall 2025
Hours are flexible but will be agreed upon ahead of time
Minimum commitment of 10 hours/week but you should target closer to 20 hours on average

Payment:
$2500 stipend
Temporary housing in Madison may be available

We’re building a permanent endowment to offer annual internships/student co-ops at Sector67, if you’d like to contribute please contact us for more information or donate here.

Interested?  Apply now

We’ll be reviewing applications starting April 15th, 2024, applicants should not expect to hear from us until late April.

Opportunity:
Sector67 has a very wide variety of ongoing projects. Interns are welcome to assist with building construction, tool construction/refurbishment, website/backend updates, plan/teach classes, manage social media, grow the Madison Tool Library, etc. It’s up to you to bring your passions and motivation, this opportunity is intentionally flexible to align to your interests.

Requirements:
Sector67 is hosting up to two paid internships:
Must have a reliable way to get here (or motivation to use our shop to make your transportation reliable)
Open to anyone 16 years or older
No experience necessary, enthusiasm to learn required

Program Window:
10 week minimum commitment – starting summer or fall 2024
Hours are flexible but will be agreed upon ahead of time
Minimum commitment of 10 hours/week but you should target closer to 20 hours on average

Payment:
$2500 stipend
Temporary housing in Madison may be available

You can join our (virtual/in-person) monthly meetings – always the 1st Tuesday of the month at 7PM. Information to join is shared on our mailing list a few days before the event, just click request to join group to receive e-mail notifications. The monthly meeting is set up as a 7 minute show and tell, you’re welcome to share a project you’re working on/completed/etc. No sales pitches please.

We’ve reopened to new memberships (see About page for more information) for anyone who’s fully vaccinated [shots + 2 weeks], please contact us with information about your needs and we can go from there. You can provide financial support for our organization, we appreciate the community’s support over the past few years!

TL:DNR – please consider donating to Sector67 this year, we’ve found two matching donors for up to $20,000 in donations so $1 from you turns into $3.75 donated.

***

UPDATE: We made it! I just tallied everything up and with some last minute donations today we reached $31,410.62 in total. This has been doubled 2x to $91,410.62 and then around $80,000 in expenses will be matched at 25% by the WEDC grant, to be reimbursed at some point next year (+$20,000 returned).

THANKS EVERYONE for your support! Now we have to build/install/finish the construction 🙂

***

As you might have noticed from the giant WEDC / City of Madison sign in front of the building we received a matching grant in ~2017 to help with construction costs. Basically the state reimburses 25% of any cost to permanently improve the building (doors/windows/walls, not tables/chairs/etc). We’ve managed to extend this grant several times so we can try to take advantage of the $250,000 in matching money allocated, however we’ve run out our leash as far as WEDC will allow and our matching grant expires at the end of the year. Over the past 5 years we’ve carefully documented and turned in over 629 receipts for $177,250 in matching funds.

We’re looking to raise funds to maximize our use of the WEDC grant and support some critical construction projects as we wrap up 2022. The good news is in hunting around for some larger donors to support remaining construction expenses we’ve found two matching / challenge grant donors who are willing to match 2:1 any money raised from Oct 1st through December 31st, 2022 up to $20,000, the bad news is we need to find the other $20,000 to match! In addition to this match, the WEDC money will reimburse at 25% so every $1 you donate turns into $3.75 to help us wrap up expenses in adding the elevator ($33k), HVAC system ($25k) and fire alarm ($9k) into our expenses this year.

How can you help? Make a donation of cash/check/crypto/Paypal/stocks between now and the end of the year and we’ll do the rest – the easiest way is through Paypal there’s no fee/costs and 100% of donations are passed along directly, they also provide a donation receipt.

Your company may provide donation matching which is often as simple as submitting that you’ve donated. If you search “*company name* donation matching” you can also find programs that might be buried otherwise.

The goal is to pay the balance on the elevator, 2nd floor HVAC, and the fire alarm this year and continue to work to install these systems (and another staircase) so we can obtain occupancy (use) of the 2nd floor and move the offices upstairs. I look forward to being done playing general contractor and getting back to teaching classes/events/etc!

THANK YOU!

Chris

Anything worthwhile starts with an alliteration. . .

We’re excited to officially join with efforts at Precious Plastic to reduce plastic waste in our community directly – this project is supported by our awesome neighborhood association:

We’ll be working forward to re-use some industrial surplus plastic extruders with a target goal of producing dimensional stock (lumber shapes) that can be used for projects in the neighborhood. If you’d like to help with the construction of the machines, testing, or have ideas on generally useful continuously-extruded plastic products please reach out. We won’t be ready for material collection until we’ve had a chance to test things out and get a batch worked through all the steps!

The Backstory:

Our work recycling/reusing plastic began at the very first Sector67 meeting at our Winnebago St location in 2010 with Scott sharing his DIY benchtop injection molder used to create train wheels for a wooden train system following the Gingery design:

The very first thing ever machined on our CNC mill was a mold to manufacture gears from laundry detergent bottles:

A little short shot (right) turned into a lot of flash (left) once the mold warmed up and separated under pressure.

We went on to make a nicer system that went into the drill press:

The challenge with injection molding is that it uses very little plastic and requires a lot of mold/demold time that’s normally fully automated with a production machine.

Many years later our interns took on a project to try extruding 3D printer filament by building the extruder and using an off the shelf winding/tensioning system with some modified software:

Making our own filament made sense when the raw stock was free, the issue being it’s unavailable in affordable small quantities as it’s really only an industrial product where manufacturers burn through it by the ton. The other difficulty is keeping the input plastic exceptionally clean, the 3D printer nozzle is only 0.40mm in diameter so even the smallest contaminants stand to block up the nozzle in short order. Ultimately this project was shelved with the wide availability of inexpensive 3D printer filament as machines dropped in price and demand grew.

In 2019 interns Sadiq and David worked with Ida to build a standalone drill press molder for a pilot run of Precious Plastic at Troy Community Garden: