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In the end, it was riveting finish: A campaign to save part of the Michigan factory where Rosie the Riveter and thousands of other women built B-24 bombers during World War II has raised the money needed to turn the facility into a museum.

The site's manager had given organizers of the Save the Willow Run Bomber Plant campaign until Thursday to raise $8 million to buy the now-derelict plant. As recently as Tuesday, we told you that it could be the end of the road for the plant in Ypsilanti Township, Mich., because organizers were $1 million short.

But, as The Associated Press reported on Thursday, campaign organizers "closed in on a big one." Here's more:

"That allowed [fundraising consultant Michael] Montgomery and his partners to get "within spitting distance of the full eight (million)" and enough to go forward with a purchase agreement, which he expects to be finalized in seven to 10 days.

"Meanwhile, those behind the effort will go back to raising the additional dollars needed to make the new Yankee Air Museum a reality."

Around the country, there are lots of tinkerers working on what they hope will be the next brilliant idea — but who don't have the tools in their garage to build it.

In dozens of cities, those innovators can set up shop in a "maker space" — community workshops where members have access to sophisticated tools and expertise.

A Growth Spurt For Maker Spaces

Since moving into its new home this month, the for-profit Columbus Idea Foundry in Columbus, Ohio, is now considered to be the largest maker space in the world. The facility is being renovated with hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds. It also received a $350,000 grant from the nonprofit ArtPlace America to aid its "creative place-making" mission.

Members of Artisan's Asylum, a 40,000-square-foot hacker space in Somerville, Mass., have raised $4 million on Kickstarter for a variety of small businesses. Executive director Molly Rubenstein says $3.5 million in venture capital investments have also gone to startups at Artisan's Asylum, where many classes are sold out and a waiting list exists for studio space.

The TechShop in Detroit, opened in partnership with automaker Ford, is credited with helping increase the number of inventions by Ford employees, according to Bill Coughlin, CEO of Ford Global Technologies. TechShop recently announced it was opening a maker space in partnership with BMW in Munich. TechShop facilities were opened in Pittsburgh and Arlington, Va., after thousands of memberships were purchased for veterans by the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Innovation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Twitter is growing and its brand is spreading but Wall Street is unimpressed. On Tuesday, the company announced it had doubled its quarterly revenue from a year ago to $250 million. The social networking site also increased its number of active users to 255 million, up 25 percent from a year earlier.

But despite the gains, Wall Street analysts have called the growth tepid. Twitter went public last November, and its shares have traded as high as $74; on Wednesday, it opened at under $38.

Nat West, owner of Reverend Nat's Hard Cider in Portland, Ore., is spicing up his cider made from eating apples with ginger juice, herbal tonics, coffee and hops. He has even aged cider in a tank with crushed rock slabs to impart notes of "minerality."

Schilling Cider, in Seattle, uses mostly Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Honeycrisp apples — varieties that "don't have any flavor," in owner Colin Schilling's opinion. That's why he steeps bags of chai spices in one of his ciders, ages others with oak chips and adds Ecuadorian cocoa nibs to another to create a thick and brownie-like beverage only faintly reminiscent of apples. Schilling once even fermented some apple juice over Japanese horseradish for what was intended to be a "wasabi cider."

"That was awful," he says. "We dumped it out."

Unsurprisingly, there are critics of such experimental cider-making.

Steve Wood, co-owner of Farnum Hill Cider, grows about 70 acres of apples on his New Hampshire farm. For him, making cider is less like craft brewing than it is like making wine — a process of tending to the trees, growing the fruit, harvesting the apples at optimal ripeness, blending the juices and fermenting it in oak barrels and steel tanks. Wood uses apple varieties like Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill and Bramtot — varieties too bitter or sour to eat but long used in Europe for cider-making.

"The goal is to bring our fruit to the bottle in the most delicious way possible," Wood says. "It's a very hands-off, white wine-making approach."

Adding anything but apple juice to the cider would go against Wood's most basic principles: "I would never, in my wildest imagination, put jalapenos in my cider. That would be like if a Bordeaux winemaker threw a bunch of hot peppers into his wine."

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