So over the last 2 weeks, we here at Nakatomi have been busting ass getting our print studio up and running… and now we want to show off the fruits of our labors!

This whole thing fits into a 10×15 garage, and ran us just under 2K.  We finished our first print in the new studio last night, and we couldn’t be more proud (or smug in our awesome-sauce.)

Nakatomi fellow Clint Wilson pitched in for a ton of work and advice.

Satch Grimley is a local master printer here in Austin, and all it took was a quick “Hey Satch, know where we can score a rack on the cheap?” and he had the answer.

This was fun and pretty simple.  Just build a box, and slap it on two furniture dolly’s.  Sand it and add a layer of paint.  I found pro exposure booths costing upwards of 7K.  Screw that noise.  The glass was a bit to bite off, but it does the job.  Tempered means it’ll break into thousands of little pieces one day, as opposed to a few Jugular-cutting shards that normal glass breaks into.  The REAL kicker is that the glass shop (Binswanger) left the invoice from the place THEY got the top  from taped to it…and they paid $103 for it…and charged me $300.  Whatevs.

So the next thing we needed was a Washout booth to clean our screens and equiment.  BUT- we didn’t want to splash junk all over the house and garage whenever we printed-

Pretty cool, eh?

It was also pretty important that the whole thing be able to breakdown for transport and cleaning and maintenance if needed.  So…

Of course, spraying water at something I just built was a little scary…especially if we were running eletricity to it, SO…

And because it wasn’t awesome ENOUGH…

And most importantly, we needed a table to do the printing on-

So, there you have it.  We still have a few details to square away, but for all intents and purposes, we have a fully functioning shop in under 2 weeks and 2K in expenses.  If you’re in Austin and want to come by and check it out, drop me an email!

-alex fugazi