The Workshop Club [tm]: We need a "Shop Club"

My Son shot that. We were doin' margaritas at Lindo Michoacan in Vegas

If there were a service you could join (e.g., via a reasonable monthly or annual membership subscription fee, much like a health club membership) and avail yourself of a complete array of the best woodworking, metal, and electronics shop (incl. paint? glass? ceramics? welding?) hand, bench, and table tools at your convenience, anywhere in the nation (world?), would you do so?

I would. In a heartbeat. A no-brainer.

Gotta love the dudes not wearing safety glasses. Groan...
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BACKSTORY ON THE IDEA

I've been a "knowledge worker" across the entire span of my white collar career (QC/QA/QI, quantitative analytics, health information technology consulting). Prior to that I played guitar for a living (my wife told people her husband worked in "the non-profit sector").

Lately, though, I find myself itching to build some physical things, work with my hands as well as my brain.

When I was a kid (I'm 68), my Dad -- rest his soul -- was a semiconductor research technician for AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He had the baddest basement electronics workshop I could imagine (he built all kinds of stuff from scratch components, including radios and our first TV).

By the time I reached high school, I had the baddest basement chemistry lab I could imagine -- courtesy of the Bell Labs "Gift Shop," as they called the supply room.

Lordy.

In high school I took the full range of mechanical and architectural drafting classes and wood and metal shop. I loved that stuff.

As a young adult, I did (out of necessity) all of my own car repair work -- from routine maintenance through brake, clutch, and valve jobs all the way up to the engine I replaced in my Ford van after it broke a piston.

I also took up photography while traveling around the nation in a band. Our drummer was an ace photographer, and taught me a ton. Back in the days of analog film photography, larger cities had commercial darkrooms where you could pay by the hour to develop and print your own stuff, using house chemicals and the best equipment, stuff that would be out of reach for the average amateur. I used the one in downtown Seattle extensively. Eventually I would build my own darkroom. I became a wizard of pushing the envelope on 35mm Kodak Tri-X and making poster sized blowups on the wall.

I finally attended college in my mid-thirties at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (the bloom having finally come fully off the road rat guitar player rose). I was studying experimental Psych and Statistics for my major, but I filled in some of my liberal arts elective requirements with courses such as photography, film design, video production, and Technical Theater (I'd actually entered undergrad school to study advertising, specifically "B2B" corporate / industrial communications).

UTK had (and I'm sure still has) an excellent theater program, replete with their own in-house set design, lighting design, and costume design production shops.

Prior to commencing with college, I'd built (again, out of necessity) the audio monitor systems and overhead stage lighting arrays for my last road band. Everywhere we went, if the house equipment was inadequate (usually the case), we'd busily mount our own gear via chains, racks, and hardware affixed through the drop ceilings. I'm sure we broke a lot of OSHA regs.

I thrived. I quickly became the professor's de facto "shop foreman" (he quickly saw that I already had the shop skills and safety awareness) as we designed and built the incredible rolling sets and flying rigging for the department's production of "Peter Pan" that term -- replete with a fully decked-out pirate ship.

I don't recall any right angles in that entire effort ;)

I was graduated from UTK in 1985 at the age of 39, and took up my first white collar gig in a radiation lab the Oak Ridge. The rest is technocrat history.

I nominally "retired" last year as my company's federal project was waning, and continue now with my solo efforts as a Health IT journalist while I work on a book project and some incipient independent consulting services, but I am also nurturing several ideas for physical products (one of which, while a narrow niche product with relatively small market potential, may well be patentable). Products that will require more than manual and electronic hand tools out in the garage: minimally a precision table saw, a band saw, and a drill press, among other implements.

My particular problem goes more to space than cost (a central problem in large cities). I've been skulking around places like Lowe's, pricing things I'd need. The problem is "where would I put these things?"
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"MY SHOP CLUB"

Just brainstorming here. Pretty simple, actually. Not exactly rocket science. Club subscription membership model analogies abound.

You sign up and pay monthly or annually.
Before you are allowed access to the shops, you attend basic training classes and pass the requisite skills/safety exam, and you agree to always don appropriate safety attire.
Serious violation(s) of safety practices will get you suspended or booted out. Do your drinking after you leave for the day.
Membership options include levels of accident coverage. Your membership contract stipulates that you must carry a basic acceptable level of accident/injury coverage.
Shop access is available Monday through Sunday, 6 a.m. to midnight. SME's are onsite to help you (think Apple Store "Genius Bar").
Your membership avails you of a variety of significant discounts on tools, equipment, and supplies (which are all right there, readily available in the larger store).
You can sign up to attend regularly scheduled shop skills / topical events featuring the breadth of recognized experts and vendor-sponsored sessions (including things like CAD - Computer Assisted Design technology).* Think "Tool Time" without the dopey stuff.
Your membership also includes a first-rate monthly magazine, one that features exemplary things made by other members willing to share their projects and techniques. There's a blog, a Twitter handle, and a YouTube channel -- an ancillary online community spanning the social media gamut.

* e.g., major music retailers such as Sam Ash routinely sponsor artist workshop events, replete with mini-concert stages erected in the middle of the stores.

Seriously? Need I continue? I can if I have to. This is just a one-draft, one afternoon quickie blog post concept brainstorm proposition. The home improvement chain that picks this up and runs with it will create a heretofore unimagined density of store brand loyalists and will surely experience a sustained and growing uptick in aggregate product sales.**

** Might a service such as envisioned here pose a risk of "cannibalizing" sales of these larger, higher ticket shop tools? Entirely plausible. Not having access to your sales data regarding such lines, I'm in no position to determine the baseline from which to estimate anything like that. In any event, my focus is on the larger, net picture. But, it's certainly something warranting analytic consideration.

Also unclear is whether there would be an elevation or decrement of the divorce rate among the newly-minted "MyShopClub Widows" demographic. ;)

Where do I join?