HACKENSACK — More than a dozen people gathered on a recent Thursday to make things in a former wood shop. There were no saws or hammers.
Over the summer, a group of educators from the Bergen County Technical School district and Bergen Community College transformed the little-used wood shop into the Bergen Makerspace and began inviting people in. The Makerspace offers classes on how to use some of the equipment there–laser cutters, 3-D printers, Arduino electronics boards–and a space for anyone to work on their projects.
Alan Alejo, 42, of Woodland Park, came to the the Makerspace to figure out how to make his artwork less time-consuming. Alejo makes sculptures out of thousands of gel capsules.
His process is to line the capsules up in jigs and glue them together, line by line, stack by stack. A typical piece takes three months.
To cut that time down, Alejo thought of using a 3-D…
