I’m including a really rough sketch of the workshop I’m picturing, a sort of mix of water wheel driven retrofitted power tools, but centered around this big solar collector and a fresnel lens setup for a solar plasma cutter, welder, sinterer using a design kind of like an observatory with a big rotating dome on the top that can be aimed at the sun to pipe down a steady sunlight deathray. I’m not sure yet about the mirror design, and any other uses for the space as shown. Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas.

I figure this place is multi purpose, maybe a makerspace, maybe a small factory co-op, but mostly doing metal work. I don’t have a specific purpose in mind yet but it’d be nice if it reinforced those themes. I love workshops, so I think this will be a lot of fun. and I really loved those diagrams of mills from the industrial revolution in our midle school history texts, I’d like to take some of those technologies and reimagine them with a modern approach to workplace safety.

My instinct was to make the lean-to on the left a blacksmith forge, with a firewall separating it from the main structure, but coal or charcoal are probably not what I’d like to use (though charcoal probably isn’t out altogether as it can be kind of green). A solar forge would be an interesting challenge, it might have to work like a schieffer parabolic solar cooker, with the reflector shooting concentrated light through a hole in the wall, as the interior needs to be pretty dark so you can see the color of the metal as you work it. Could be all kinds of other things too.