Youngstown FabLab heading to New Orleans naval base

YOUNGSTOWN

A $150,000 trailer full of Youngstown-built technology will hit the road Thursday to begin a journey to the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in New Orleans.

The Transportable Digital Fabrication Lab is one of four 34-foot mobile additive manufacturing units created for the government by Youngstown Business Incubator portfolio company Applied Systems and Technology Transfer.

The traileris filled with manufacturing technologies and learning resources: two 3-D printers, a laser engraver, a pair of routers for electronic circuit and component fabrication, a milling station, a digital design lab, and learning space featuring laptops, monitors and whiteboards.

Nick Mazurek, the head of engineering, design and development at AST2 and a 2016 graduate of Youngstown State University, said, “Everything in here is networked. People using the lab can pull out the laptops in the unit and hook them up to monitors to start designing what they need to produce, and they can even project their work to the large central monitor if they’re teaching a class or trying to share the design with the room,” Mazurek said. “Once they have their design, they can send it to any of the machines in the unit and move directly into production.”

The FabLab, as it’s colloquially known, can be used as a mobile training center to give students hands-on experience with the technology or as a mobile manufacturing center to assist military maintenance battalions on deployment.

Read more about it in Wednesday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.