Funded by MIT, with capital-equipment acquisitions covered by an endowment gift from the Lemelson Foundation, the Edgerton Student Shop provides MIT students with the tools and training to fabricate almost anything, for their own use or to support research and coursework.

The shop offers intensive training classes of 12 hours per student. With nothing but raw materials, students learn to machine the parts for a flashlight from scratch. While it is primarily a metalworking shop, there are also 3-D printers on site.

Students have fabricated parts for the VERTIGO experiment, now installed in the International Space Station, and parts for a dark-matter detector installed 2,000 feet underground in New Mexico. One graduate student recently fabricated his own set of wedding rings.