The Industrial Design department is in the process of expanding the space allotted to each of these distinct workshop disciplines, and industrial design is constantly upgrading machinery and teaching new techniques as soon as they become known and tested. The workshops have recently undergone an expansion in space and facilities, allowing the department to better accommodate our ever-increasing student body.

It is used to fabricate items and jigs in both natural and artificial wood products. In this Workshop Area, you will find five band saws, four drill presses, jointer, planer, two miter saws, a panel saw, and four wood shapers and table routers. There are two wood lathes and two isolated sanding rooms containing spindle and disc sanders and one more lathe for working foam plastics.

The Wood Shop features four state-of-the-art SawStop table saws. These saws were recently acquired as part of the Academy's cutting-edge effort in shop safety. Each saw can electronically tell if a body part, such as a finger, contacts the saw blade, and stops the blade from spinning so rapidly that only a minor cut is incurred.

There is a highly efficient dust collection system, which is piped permanently to each machine and has floor collection outlets. This system features high-performance HEPA dust filtering to keep the air as free as possible from visible dust particles.

The department recently expanded to two additional booths, which comprise eighteen student workstations.

There are twin high-output air compressors to handle the air requirements of the booths and the other Industrial Design shops, and two state-of-the-art automatic spray gun washing stations were added in September 2005. The paint shop uses the best-quality automotive paints, with 150,000 colors stored in a computer database, and a color bank allowing any of these colors to be mixed from stock on an "as needed" basis. Students refer to a color chip book, fill out an order form, and the color is mixed for their project. All students in the Industrial Design program at the Academy of Art University learn to use a spray gun to apply paint in their first semester; these skills are continually used and refined throughout a student's tenure at Academy of Art University.

Most of the work here is done in aluminum, and these tools are used to make things from plastic. We have four precision machine lathes (three with digital readouts), four vertical milling machines (two with digital readouts), a bead-blasting cabinet, two grinders, and large sheet metal shear and bending brakes.

We also teach composite lay-up, sculpting in foam plastic and clay, and vacuum forming using the department's own custom-built vacuum-forming machine.

These include a laser-sheet material cutter, a 3D duplicating machine, which works by plastic filament deposition, a small CNC 3-axis milling machine, and two 3D digitizing probes. We will soon expand and add a standard-sized 3-axis milling machine, a room-sized 5-axis milling machine, and additional laser cutting machines.