Paul Bass Photo
The water was gushing, the sheet of steel inserted. And the newest engine of New Haven’s innovation economy was ready to roll.
Or, more precisely, cut.
Meet Max. AKA GlobalMax. Max is a water jet cutter, a machine that combines water shot out at high speed with coarse, ground-up stone. Max has been known to carve up wood, metal, glass, stone, mirror, plastic, rubber … even, it is said, diamonds.
Max has moved into a workshop in the basement of 770 Chapel St., the headquarters of MakeHaven, a 340-member nonprofit community of artisans and artists and inventors and designers and entrepreneurs that teems with the talent and spirit driving New Haven’s new economy. With the help of $65,000 from the Elm City Innovation Collaborative (ECIC), MakeHaven ordered and set up Max to serve at the ready of members creating product prototypes and artworks.
MakeHaven “Expert Maker” Lior Trestman (pictured) and his crew put Max on display for the public Thursday, feeding it a sheet of metal with a familiar design sketched on it. A design that at first look resembled a marsupial.
“It’s incredible what it’s able to do,” Trestman said as a crowd of goggle-equipped muckamucks watched Max cut away. “It takes water — just water — puts it into a really powerful pump, pumps it up to 32,000 pounds a square inch, mixes it with an abrasive, a stone that is [ground] up in small pieces, like coarse sand. Mixes it with water. It can cut pretty much anything.”
After the noise stopped, Trestman reached in …
… and retrieved the finished product. It wasn’t a marsupial. It was a representation of a certain 18.7‑square-mile city …
… whose mayor, Toni Harp, marveled at the result as she displayed it alongside chief MakeHaven macher J.R. Logan. She said Max’s work exemplifies why “New Haven is driving Connecticut’s economy.
“We value innovation,” Harp remarked to the crowd. “Thanks for giving us the tools.”
ECIC chief Michael Harris spoke of how with grants like this one for Max, his group is “betting on people in New Haven who are already driving the work” of building an innovation economy.
Meanwhile, outside the workshop, in MakeHaven’s main maker space, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) of Sophie’s Needles and Threads was altering a winter coat for a customer.
And upstairs in the first-floor lobby, a relic reminded visitors of what took place in this building from the late 1980s through 1993, when New Haven’s City Hall on Church Street was cleared out for renovations.