What Equipment Does a Standard Fab Lab Have?

One of the things that makes a fab lab a fab lab — rather than just a well-equipped workshop — is a shared core inventory. The Fab Charter, the founding document of the network, describes labs as sharing an evolving inventory of core capabilities so that people and projects can move between labs anywhere in the world. If you document a project in one lab, someone in another lab on another continent should be able to reproduce it on essentially the same machines.

That portability is the point. Here is what the core capabilities look like in practice.

Computer-controlled cutting

The workhorse of most fab labs is the laser cutter, used to cut and engrave sheet materials like plywood, acrylic, and cardboard. Alongside it sits a vinyl cutter, a smaller machine that cuts adhesive vinyl, paper, and flexible copper sheet — useful for signage, stencils, and flexible circuits. Between the two, a newcomer can go from a drawing on screen to a physical object in an afternoon, which is why cutting is usually the first capability people are trained on.

Large-format CNC machining

A large CNC router — big enough to cut a full sheet of plywood — lets a lab make furniture, enclosures, boat parts, even the components of small structures. This is typically the largest, loudest, and most training-intensive machine in the room, and most labs gate access to it behind formal instruction, an approach covered in more depth in our guide to how makerspaces structure equipment training.

Precision milling and electronics

A hallmark that separates fab labs from many general makerspaces is in-house electronics production. A small precision milling machine cuts traces into copper-clad board, so members can design and mill their own circuit boards rather than ordering them. That machine sits next to an electronics workbench: soldering stations, oscilloscopes or multimeters, and stocks of common components and microcontrollers.

3D printing

Essentially every lab runs one or more 3D printers, usually filament-based machines, for parts that are hard to cut from flat stock. 3D printers come with their own ventilation and material considerations, which is one reason labs put them in supervised areas.

Molding, casting, and computing

Rounding out the inventory are supplies for molding and casting — machining a mold, then casting parts in silicone, resin, or plaster — plus a bank of computers running design software, since every machine in the room is driven by a digital file.

What this costs, and where the list comes from

The Fab Foundation publishes official guidance on planning and equipping a lab, including how the inventory scales from a starter setup to a full lab. The originating program at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms maintains the technical lineage of the list itself. Equipping a full lab is a serious capital project — generally the largest line in a new lab's budget — and if you are weighing it against a leaner community workshop, our breakdown of small makerspace startup costs shows how much cheaper the non-standardized route can be.

That is also the practical difference between the two models: a makerspace buys whatever equipment its community wants, while a fab lab commits to the shared inventory in exchange for membership in a global network. We compare the two models directly in fab lab vs. makerspace.