Bonjour, kia ora: why a small workshop in Akaroa

Bonjour, kia ora, welcome to Le Petit Atelier.

Today the plan went into one place for the first time: a folder of plain text files, version-controlled, with a README at the top. It is a strange first day for a workshop. No bench, no tools on the wall. Just a list of what we want to build, and why. But that is how we will work from now on, so it may as well start that way.

The idea

Le Petit Atelier is a small open workshop and a YouTube channel in Akaroa, on Banks Peninsula. We repair things, recycle things, and build low-cost technology for the place we live in. Then we publish every design, free, so anyone can build it too.

The workshop is a c.1868 timber cottage at 63 Rue Lavaud, opposite Nomad Wholefoods, the organic refill shop across the street. It has been a church, a lawyer’s office, a house and visitor accommodation. Now it gets a workbench.

Why here

A few things bother us about the Peninsula, and they are the reasons for the project.

• Plastic leaves the Peninsula to be dealt with somewhere else, if at all.
• Things that could be repaired get replaced, and the people who know how to fix them are getting fewer.
• Conservation volunteers do by hand what a cheap sensor could do for them, because nobody has built, tested and published the tool.
• If you are young here and want to try electronics or 3D printing, the nearest place is in Christchurch.

None of this needs a factory. It needs a bench, some patience, and the habit of writing things down.

The four rules

Everything we take on has to pass these. They are short on purpose.

1. Every project repairs, reuses or protects something.
2. Every design is published under an open licence.
3. Recycled or reclaimed materials first.
4. No sponsor that conflicts with the mission.

The second rule is the one people ask about. Why give it away? Because a design that sits in a drawer helps nobody, and because the only way to know if a plan is good is for a stranger to build it from the instructions and tell us where they got stuck.

Three levels

Every project should work at three levels: beginner, maker and expert. The same machine should have something for a nine-year-old with a screwdriver and something for an engineer with an oscilloscope. Sometimes the beginner version is just one printed part. That is fine.

The name

Le Petit Atelier means “the little workshop”. It ties to Petitgen, the small company behind it, to Akaroa’s French history, and to my accent, which you will hear on the channel. The tagline is in lower case on purpose: small workshop, big impact. The name alone doesn’t say what we do. The tagline has to.

What it is not

It is not a startup. It is not a shop that happens to make videos, and it is not a content business chasing numbers. It runs one to two days a week, protected, alongside everything else. That limit matters. It means some things will be slow, and we will say so here.

What this journal is for

This is the build log. What we decided, what we made, what broke, what we parked and why. Dates are real. Where something failed, it goes in too, because the failures are usually the useful part.

If you live nearby, you can already help: bring us something broken, suggest a project, or join the list and hear when the doors open.

Les plans sont gratuits — the plans are free.

Sebastien