I want to build more than I want to disassemble, but maybe I should check out the BBQ people's meetup.

The primary focus is on RE, of course, but the folks there are generally curious, and a large minority of the talks are about forward engineering.

I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.

Have you looked into a local makerspace (e.g. Maker Nexus)?