When you need to make copies, you go to a copy shop. When you need to make a picture frame, you go to a frame shop. But where do you go when you need to make the next brilliant invention? Now, there's the TechShop.

It is the biggest startup garage in Silicon Valley. TechShop is a complete development and prototyping shop for inventors who don't have a lot of money or connections. At headquarters in Menlo Park, California, it provides the training, the tools, the workbench and the support. All you need to bring is your brilliant idea.

Dan Sandberg follows his "telerobotic" brother Roy

Roy Sandberg and his brother Dan have been working on theirs for about 2 years. Dan is in the shop. Roy is 400 miles away. Yet Roy can travel around the shop and both brothers can see each other and talk to each other, thanks to the telepresence robot they are developing entirely in this unique place—where inventors come to play.

"Everybody likes to make stuff," says Jim Newton. "Or, I should say, everybody wants to make stuff. But they don't, for various reasons. Most of it is that they don't have the space or the equipment. They have the ideas in their head, but they don't have anywhere to go to do it."

So Jim Newton opened the first TechShop, on October 1, 2006. A year later, he had signed up 300 members paying an average $100 a month to spend time in the shop after their day jobs. In some ways, it's like health club. But whereas a typical health club operates on a 2.5% rate of usage, TechShop is experiencing 10% usage. And classes have turned out to be an additional revenue center, something he struggled to persuade a former partner to allow him to conduct.

Jim Newton, founder of TechShop

These "health" club members "work out" with the expensive, exotic machines of their dreams. Drill presses, lasers and lathes, oh my! Plasma cutters, 3 kinds of welders, CNC machines.

The most popular machine here has to be the laser cutter. It will etch your name into a piece of chocolate or cut through solid oak. Next is the 3D printer. Just about anything you cook up on a computer screen, it will turn into a solid object, one thin layer at a time.

"I used the 3D printer to make the individual keys," Eric Smith told us, pointing to his working model of an old-fashioned calculator. "You now, traditionally, you would have to have a mold to do injection-molded plastic, and the turnaround for that is weeks or months. "

But it's not just about the gear available to members. TechShop has grown into a community, a support group for those who think different.

Jerry Lugert and his reusable electronic ink

"And that's really, really helpful," inventor Jerry Lugert tells us. "You know, the cooperative nature of this sort of place is amazing."

Jerry used the laser cutter for his idea: Reusable electronic pictures.

I told him, "You sound as though you just might move in here."

"I think I already have. I spent last night here in the parking lot!"

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