We put our workshop lessons on a public skill tree

Last night I gave my assistant a new standing job: every trick, lesson, and tip we learn on the workshop equipment gets organized into an interconnected graph. Not a notebook, a tree, where each skill points to what you need before it and what it unlocks after. And crucially: it goes on the public internet, because knowledge that only levels me up is knowledge half-wasted.

The first tree is live: skills.senku.im, 3D printing, forty nodes.

One thing matters to me about how it’s built. We are not claiming to be experts. Most of the tree is the work of people who genuinely are: Ellis’ print tuning guide, Teaching Tech’s calibration site, the Prusa knowledge base, CNC Kitchen’s testing mindset. All credited by name, linked directly, organized into a ladder so you know what order to learn them in. That ordering is the thing nobody hands you: every guide assumes you know which guide to read first.

The rest is the part only we could add: lessons we paid for in failed prints. That a printed hole comes out a quarter-millimeter smaller than you modeled it, and why. That vase mode silently drops any inner contour, and the trick that gets you inner features anyway. That you print a three-minute calibration coin before any twelve-hour print, because the cost asymmetry is a thousand to one. Each of those is marked as ours, verified in our workshop, on our machine, with our scrap pile as the receipts.

Click a node, read what it teaches, follow the link, tick it done. The tree remembers your progress. Level 1 is your first clean print. Level 4 is a multi-part assembly that fits on the first try. The milestones in between are the moments you actually feel.

Laser cutting and metal casting trees are next, as fast as we earn the lessons honestly.

Climb it, and if you know a guide that belongs on it, tell me. Organizing what’s already there is the whole point.