It’s an uncharacteristically gloomy day at Building 17 of Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. From the outside, it looks like any other office; it’s unremarkable except for the free valet parking booth erected in front of the lobby, a perk that saves staff from having to walk more than a few steps from their cars.

The drab facade belies the state-of-the-art 22,000-square-foot hardware lab inside, where Facebook will prototype its solar-powered drones, internet-beaming lasers, Oculus VR headsets and custom servers.

These sorts of research and development labs are usually highly secretive and off bounds to journalists, but Facebook – predominantly a software company focused on building the world’s largest social network – wants the world to know that it’s serious about hardware.

“Our mission is to connect the world. So we’re working on hardware that furthers that goal,” said Mikal Greaves, Facebook’s mechanical and power manager, who took more than a dozen journalists on a tour of the facility, dubbed Area 404, this week.

The name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the common website “page not found” error message. Facebook’s engineering teams have been pushing for a space to collaborate and build prototypes more quickly, and now that space is “found”.

There are two main parts to the space: electrical engineering labs and prototyping workshops. The former allows for the construction and testing of specialized circuit boards. The latter features more heavy duty machinery such as 3D printers, waterjet cutting machines that can slice through thick slabs of metal, industrial lathes and multi-axis CNC (Computer Numeric Control) milling machines that can carve intricate objects from large aluminium blocks.

The bulk of the work appears involve making prototypes of next-generation servers, storage devices, networking equipment and power systems for the company’s data centers. It’s not particularly sexy, but this is the backbone of Facebook, storing users’ photos, video and data as well as data from hundreds and thousands of apps using the Facebook Connect platform.

The lab is also working on evolving Oculus’s virtual reality and augmented reality technology, building parts for the solar-powered drone Aquila, as well as the company’s terrestrial connectivity systems such as Terragraph, which brings high-speed wireless internet connectivity to urban areas.

“The primary reason for Facebook to have a facility like this is speed. Previously we used to have our manufacturing partners making parts for us. They can certainly make them, but it takes longer than we would like. By bringing it in-house we’ve shortened that development time,” said Greaves.

He cites the example of the company’s HapiLink system (short for high-altitude platform internet link), which uses high bandwidth lasers to deliver connectivity from drones. Almost all of the components, with the exception of the carbon fiber casing, can now be built in Area 404. “It saves us weeks to months,” he added.

Once the prototypes are made and tested, they are passed on to manufacturing partners to mass-produce. At least they will be. Nothing produced in the lab’s first two months has reached the manufacturing stage yet.

The Canadian CNC model maker Spencer Burns, who previously worked at Tesla, talks about the computer-controlled prototyping equipment like a kid in a candy store.

“I’m one of the fortunate people who get to work in this lab full time and work with these really cool machine tools,” he said.

He explained that even the floor of the space was an impressive feat of engineering. A typical office building would not be able to support the weight or vibrations from the machinery, so the shell was gutted and the floor dug out down to the mud, into which 101 metal pylons were drilled into the bedrock, reinforced by three feet of concrete. “If there is an earthquake, this is probably a good place to be,” he joked.

He showed machine after machine, in each case giving us an example of an object or material it was capable of slicing, folding, drilling, milling or printing: a plastic casing for server parts, a gimbal for steering high-speed wi-fi signal through built-up urban spaces, a precisely cut sheet metal enclosure for electrical components.

The pièce-de-résistance was an imposing 5-axis Hermle CNC machine, which is able to create incredibly intricate carved objects from lumps of nondescript aluminium. The block is held in place on a platform inside the machine, which then swivels in a perfectly choreographed dance with a robotic arm that carves away at the metal to create a physical version of whatever digital object it’s been programmed with.

From the workbench in front of the appliance, Burns picks up a completed metal globe sculpture the machine had created earlier. It looks much like an award trophy. Its intricate form – a hollow sphere with some of the world’s continents connected with thin bands of metal to symbolize Facebook connecting the world, represented a “challenging technical exercise” for engineers.

Inside the machine sits another completed version of the same sculpture, which becomes the focal point of a demonstration of the prototyping tool in practice. The robotic arm leaps into action and Spencer urges attending journalists to marvel at its dexterity. It’s impressive, but ultimately a charade: at no point does the end mill make contact with the metal. It’s merely a dress rehearsal for making a beautiful but pointless trinket.

At that point it becomes clear that although Facebook has allowed journalists into this inner sanctum in the spirit of openness, it’s been little more than an elaborate fan dance – a tantalizing performance that hinted at the company’s capabilities but didn’t give anything away.