Zach Kaplan wants to put a factory on your desk.
Kaplan, 35, a 1997 Glenbrook North High School graduate, still grins a lot like a happy Northbrook kid, even though he’s married now and living near his west Loop company that employs 30 people.
Why not? His company’s Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000 to put a new device into production just raised $626,599.
Sometime around September 2015, you’ll be able to buy a Carvey, a machine in a plastic box about the size and appearance of a large microwave oven, for about $2,000. Paired with free Easel software from Kaplan’s Inventables company, the Carvey will be able to carve almost anything out of 8- by 12-inch materials up to 2.5 inches thick.
Carvey is like a big computerized numerical control machine that builds things in factories, but without the big and without the technical difficulty. The software is designed to allow anybody to go from conception to product “in under five minutes.”
It could be the next step in “the maker market,” the individual production movement that took off with 3D printing and continued with small shop carvers like Inventables’ Shapeoko, a $650 kit that requires users to wear eye protection.
“This is an exciting thing,” said Placid Ferreira, head of the Department of Mechanics Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s a whole new future.”
Many desktop designs, he said, will wind up running powerful, fast machines in factories before long.
Kaplan has a 2001 U of I engineering degree, but that’s not where he says his skills were derived.
“There were two teachers at GBN, Jim Howie, a shop guy, and Jeff Jordan, a physics teacher, who got together and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we move in all this interesting gear, and what if we turned it into a program called SciTech?’ Essentially, it’s like high school engineering – on steroids.
“Way ahead of its time. It was better than U of I engineering.”
The program is still going on at the high school.
It’s a competitive course, open to only 50 students a year.
“We have five CNC machines and one 3D printer,” Howie said Friday.
“We put students in groups of four and challenge them to solve a problem,” he said. “The losing team buys the doughnuts.”
Howie, a baseball coach, recruited Kaplan, one of his players, to take the course. Kaplan wound up creating one of the most memorable projects in SciTech history, a working scale model of a roller coaster, 5 feet high and 12 feet long.
It went on display at Great America, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and the Toronto Museum of Science and Industry.
“It was one of the most electric classes at GBN,” Kaplan said. “These guys were relentless.”
His former teachers think highly of him, too.
“The kid had a lot on the ball,” Jordan said Friday.
Jordan said that the school board and District 225 superintendents have made sure that SciTech survived.
“The district has been very supportive in thinking outside the box,” he said. “Superintendents like Jean McGrew, and after him, Dr. (Mike) Riggle, say, ‘You got an idea? Let’s do it.’”
Kaplan, interested in improving access to edgy new technologies, has backed makers labs at the U of I and at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library.
He’s had educational opportunities since childhood. His grandfather gave him his first soldering iron in primary school, and his parents, he said, bought every kind of construction set they could find.
“I recently asked my dad, ‘What was the deal with all the construction toys?’ Kaplan said. “He said, ‘I thought they made you think.’ I took to them, and started building stuff.”
