In one end of the room is a water jet cutter that can slice through steel and aluminum sheets several inches thick. Nearby is a huge sheet metal folding machine. Over there, several heavy-duty milling machines, a couple of precision lathes, a scanning electron microscope and a computer tomography (CT) scanner.

It’s the kind of setup you might expect to see in a cutting-edge industrial factory or manufacturing plant. But this one is housed in a decidedly unlikely location: a nondescript office building at the Menlo Park headquarters of Facebook Inc.

“Who ever thought we’d be doing this at Facebook?” exclaims Spencer Burns, a model maker at the company who’s trained in the use of computer-controlled machines. He’s showing off the heavy equipment Tuesday during a press tour of the 22,000-square-foot hardware lab that the social network will unveil today. The lab is dubbed Area 404, named after the error code for a website that can’t be found; likewise, many engineers at Facebook have wanted a space to experiment with hardware but couldn’t find one.

Spencer Burns, a model maker for Facebook, shows a metal room that blocks radio frequency radiation

Until now. The new lab brings in-house most of the modeling, prototyping and failure analysis Facebook needs to do on a wide variety of projects. That should reduce the time between successive iterations of new products from weeks to days, the company says. “We’re going to be able to move really fast on hardware development,” said Burns.

The lab, the cost of which Facebook declines to reveal, won’t replace Facebook’s existing hardware-oriented labs, such as the Aquila Internet-access drone hangar in the U.K. or the Oculus virtual-reality headset facility in Seattle. But this one is intended in part to provide cross-fertilization among Facebook operations, from its computer server and data center unit to its Oculus virtual-reality headset operation. “We’re trying to bring together the various hardware teams to work together,” said Jay Parikh (pictured above), Facebook’s vice president of engineering.

Staffed with dedicated people trained in the use of the machines, the lab is divided into two main areas. One is electrical engineering labs, which are outfitted with gear specific to particular projects on some 50 workbenches. The other is the prototyping workshop with all the heavy equipment such as lathes and milling machines. The floor housing the latter, located underneath an office full of programmers, required sinking 100 pylons 60 feet deep to support the machines.

As Burns conceded, it might sound odd for a social network to be bending metal and turning lathes. But Area 404 is a signal of how Facebook aims to branch out into new markets and bolster its existing businesses.

And Facebook isn’t the only software and services company looking to leverage hardware. After years of dabbling with hardware ranging from Nexus phones and search appliances to the Nest thermostat and smoke detector and the very successful TV streaming device, Google in April created a new hardware group headed by former Motorola Inc. President Rick Osterloh. And both Google and Facebook have been designing their own servers for years now.

While the latter efforts are viewed as critical infrastructure for the companies, the two companies’ consumer-oriented hardware products have produced few big successes so far. It’s a leap for companies that made their fortune on bits to make things composed of atoms. “Their ownership of the hardware platform is limited,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Hardware historically has been very hard for software companies to do.”

Facebook’s new lab is at once an overt effort to double down on hardware of all kinds and an attempt to make those projects more likely to succeed. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s 10-year roadmap for the company that he unveiled at its F8 developer conference in April calls for an accelerating pace of hardware introductions in virtual and augmented reality and Internet connectivity following the next few years of building out services such as Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

An engineer works on a three-axis milling machine in Facebook’s new hardware lab

At least four groups will be using the lab. Facebook’s longstanding infrastructure team, which designs servers and other backroom gear to keep the company’s services humming, can use the lab to design and prototype a number of hardware components, such as heat sinks for dissipating heat generated by servers and modular shelving for the servers in its data centers. The company’s Connectivity Lab, which is creating drones, satellites and lasers to help spread Internet access around the world in less served and less developed areas, can prototype propellers for the drones as well as hardware for its new terrestrial Internet project.

The lab also could prove useful for two other key hardware groups. In April, Facebook announced that Regina Dugan, formerly head of an advanced projects group at Google, would join Building 8, Facebook’s team on more far-out projects, including hardware. Then there’s Oculus, the VR device that Facebook has started selling in earnest this year.

Uniting all these groups under one roof is no guarantee any of them will be successful, of course. After all, some of the most successful tech companies continue to be born in grungy garages, not gleaming corporate digs.

In the end, if Area 404 is to be more than a geek cave or a rich company’s vanity project, Facebook’s engineers will have to produce hardware that people want to buy.

Photos by Robert Hof