"Build Your Own" Workshop III with Workhorse Irons...

The Paradise Tattoo Gathering of 2012 was the location of another successful "Build Your Own" tattoo machine building workshop. Just like our past "BYO" workshops, we combined forces with Workhorse Irons. Workhorse Irons was a main sponsor of this year's Paradise Tattoo Gathering and BJ Johnson came out in full force with the Workhorse staff. It was great to see everyone, and in some cases meet for the first time after YEARS of phone calls and emails. Hi Johnny!

For this year's "BYO" workshop, Brett and BJ designed a frame together that incorporated great features from both Pulse and Workhorse. The result was... Well, it was pretty awesome. And pretty exclusive. The machine's production was limited to the number of people in the workshops.

We held the workshop for two groups over two days, and everything went great! Here are some photos of the action...

We hoped everyone who attended has as much fun as we did.

The "Build Your Own" Fall Session

Our Fall "Build Your Own" seminar was a huge success. We wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who attended and hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.
The best thing about a session like this, is it allows you to pick up other ideas from people who build machines every day. It also forces to you to examine your process as you guide someone through their developing process. It feels good to pay it forward. It's also nice to watch SOBA scold people when they have bad intel.
We would also like to thank SOBA for coming out and bringing his big bag of knowledge. At almost every turn he had a great trick for building or something very thought provoking. A pleasure to say the least.
To everyone who attended, thanks for coming out and to Jessica and Katie for the maple bacon cupcakes, well you know. We are in the early stages of a possible Spring "Build Your Own" session and a Fall SOBA machine building seminar at this years Paradise Tattoo Gathering.

"Build Your Own" Was a Great Time!

The Pulse "Build Your Own" Workshop at this years Paradise Tattoo Gathering was a blast. We set up the workshop for a dozen folks to come in and build any of our machines from scratch. We were lucky to have so much interest and actually sold out the event weeks in advance (thanks!).

We broke things down into two groups of six and Soba and I ran an open forum where we discussed a dozen different styles of machines. We looked at everything from the materials used to make the frame to the process and the geometry. I was even tired of hearing myself talk after a couple of hours.

The other team of Alex, Joe and Tim ran a hands on step by step assembling of a coil setup along with tutorials on capacitors, resistance, electricity and materials.

Then everyone assembled their machines and we switched groups. Happily all machines started right up and that sounded great. Everyone who attended had great questions. This is always a learning experience for me also. When people make you stop and think about things that can be taken for granted, it always make me think about our process.

I think it's always really helpful and healthful to examine how you do things, there is always something new to discover. The thing that blew me away the most about the workshop came at the end. As I was thanking everyone for coming I started to ask people where they were from. The artists had come from all over the country, Arkansas, Tennessee, San Francisco, New York, Michigan, Connecticut and Massachusetts. That felt really good, I didn't expect people to travel from all over and that was a nice surprise. As always SOBA from Workhorse straightened me out on a few things, and we swapped some cool ideas, it was great have Tim in the session, and I think it was good for Alex and Joe to get to be able to share their knowledge. All in all it was a really fantastic time. I think we were scheduled from 12 to 3pm but we ran until almost 5pm, and we could have gone longer! We are now kicking around the idea of offering an in house workshop a couple times a year where you would be able to come to Pulse take a tour and then we would sit down and build a rig. Next year we are going to try to put that together so keep it in mind. Thanks to everyone who came down.