President Barack Obama is shown a 3-D printer by Andy Leer during his tour Tuesday of the TechShop, a fabrication and prototyping studio in Pittsburgh that's open to the public via paid memberships. The president used the stop to deliver remarks on the economy.

PITTSBURGH — Surrounded by an array of gadgets and high-tech equipment, President Barack Obama pledged to boost American manufacturing and to give entrepreneurs greater access to production tools that would help bring their ideas to fruition.

Obama visited this venerable steel manufacturing city to showcase a workshop chain called TechShop, a variation on a tool lending library that provides high-end instruments to hobbyists, tinkerers and start-up businesses to help them realize their innovations. The tour was designed to draw attention to Obama’s own plan to make more government technology and assets available to the private sector.

“I can’t rent the space shuttle out to you,” he joked. “But there are areas where we can in fact enhance what is already being done by companies like TechShop.”

To maintain the U.S. edge in innovation, Obama said, “we’ve got to have basic research, we’ve got to have skills like math and science and engineering that are developed, we also have to provide platforms for people who have these ideas to go out there and actually make stuff.”

The Pittsburgh visit is part of Obama’s renewed emphasis on how to create jobs and improve wages. During the next several weeks Obama is looking to cut through the current foreign policy flare-ups with an emphasis on working families, manufacturing, wages and the need for greater spending on infrastructure projects.

Also Tuesday, the White House announced that the administration was giving entrepreneurs easier access to high-tech equipment at more than 700 research and development facilities.

Obama touted technological advances that are putting production tools in the hands of anybody who has a good idea.