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Back to the Forge: Returning Safe Metalworking to DIYode’s Community Workshop

What is this project about?

DIYode’s metalshop has been closed since June 2025, when a fire compliance review found we could not safely run it without structural changes to our space.

The problem is our layout. Our woodshop and metalshop share the same air. Welding and grinding throw sparks, and woodworking fills the room with fine dust and shavings. You cannot have both in an undivided space. Since the review, our welding benches and metal fabrication tools have sat unused, off limits to our members and to the public. The metalshop was one of our most active areas and remains one of the most asked-about, with queries from the public arriving constantly.

Our Skillforge welding series, taught by a licensed Conestoga College instructor, has been the most popular workshop we have run, and the metal-related workshops filled every time. We have managed some very limited welding workshops outdoors, but with the metalshop suspended, our members and the public, including teenagers curious about the skilled trades, have had nowhere in Guelph to try metalwork under supervision. Members who joined specifically to learn fabrication have been paying dues for a room they cannot use.

Reopening takes two things. The first is a wall: a permanent fire-rated separation engineered to the Ontario Building Code, permitted by the City of Guelph and built by a licensed contractor, with rated doors so members can still move between the two shops. The second is the equipment to work safely behind it, being a fume extractor, a downdraft table to pull grinding particulate out of the air at the bench, and replacement protective gear after 16 months in storage.

Barely anyone gets excited by drywall - but we do! And the day it passes inspection, our metalshop comes back into use, our metalworking programs restart, and anyone in Guelph who wants to learn to weld or fabricate has somewhere to go.

Why is this project important to the community?

Metalwork, including welding, is a hard thing to try casually. The equipment costs thousands, it needs proper ventilation and fire separation, and it is genuinely dangerous to learn unsupervised. Unless you enroll in a college program or already work in a shop, there is realistically nowhere in Guelph to find out whether you would be good at it - or even enjoy it.

DIYode is where that was possible, and the metalshop was the part of our workshop that people could not replicate anywhere else. Much of what we do has carried on without it. Our woodshop still runs, community groups still meet in our space, and our members still work on initiatives, like our “Ramp It Up” program building accessibility ramps for Guelph businesses. But for the last 16 months, anyone who has come to us wanting to learn to cut, weld or fabricate has been turned away, and there has been nowhere else in the city they could simply turn up and try.

That falls hardest on the people with the fewest alternatives, which is most of who we serve. It also costs Guelph something less visible: the metalshop was where our most experienced makers taught, and every month that it stays closed is a month of that teaching not happening.

The new wall and safety equipment together bring it back, and they make the building safer for the woodworking that carries on a few feet away, on the other side of the same room. One piece of permitted, inspected construction turns our biggest hurdle back into our most useful space.

Target Completion Date
December 12, 2027
Location
700 York Road
Guelph
N1E 6A5

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