3D Modeling For The Retro Gaming Community - MTM #26 Xalt.3d.designs

In this episode of Meet the Makers, discover the journey of Wyatt from XL3D Designs, a 3D printing enthusiast and retro gaming system designer. Wyatt shares how his passion for gaming led to his innovations in 3D printing, starting with wall mounts for the Wii U. Learn about his transition from using an Ender 3 Pro to mastering Fusion 360 for easier modeling. Explore his intricate creations, like Wiimote holders and gaming console dunk stands, and hear about the challenges he faced and the customer interactions that shaped his path. Additionally, gain insights into the competitive landscape of selling at shows, the importance of community feedback, managing a Patreon, and collaborating with educational institutions. Tune in to hear about Wyatt's journey, his innovative projects, and the evolving world of 3D printing and design.
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Where to find Wyatt 
Website: https://www.xalt3ddesigns.com/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/xalt3ddesigns
Tiktok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@xalt.3d.designs?lang=en
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xalt3ddesigns
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Come be a guest on meet the makers: https://forms.gle/wTqzxqGpsu9hZ39F6

Follow misfit printing on Tiktok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@misfit_printing
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CHAPTERS 
00:00 Introduction to Meet the Makers
00:19 Wyatt's Journey into 3D Printing
01:50 The Evolution of Gaming System Mounts
03:19 Showcasing the Retro Gaming Collection
07:02 The Viral TikTok Success
11:33 Challenges and Innovations in 3D Design
15:19 Collaborations and New Ventures
37:06 The Tire Tread Fidget Spinner
38:46 Testing Fidget Spinners for Different Hand Sizes
39:26 Innovative Fidget Spinner Designs
40:29 Pool Noodle Swords: A Fun DIY Project
41:29 Expanding Product Line and Business Ventures
42:17 Journey into 3D Modeling and CAD
44:58 Challenges and Triumphs in 3D Printing
49:01 Teaching and Sharing Knowledge
50:43 Building Business Relationships through 3D Printing
01:08:43 Future of 3D Printing and Personal Projects
01:16:26 Connecting with the Community and Final Thoughts

Transcript

riverside_wyatt_& kate _ jul 21, 2024 001_misfit_printing's s 
[00:00:00] Welcome back to Meet the Makers. Today I have another 3D printer if you're into retro gaming systems, then you're probably familiar with his designs. I know that I'm a big fan of many of them. Wyatt from XL3D Designs here today.
Thank you for having me. This is gonna be fun. Yeah, I'm excited and like I said, big fan of your files. I think you're gonna be a great guest today. But 
how did you get into 3D printing and how did you get into 3D modeling? I guess I'll extend that out to as well. That was about four years ago. I wanted to, cause obviously I have gaming systems, I wanted to wall mount my Wii U, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing out there that looked of what I wanted or functioned the way I wanted.
So I did CAD in high school, and that was, 06 was when I graduated, so it's been a while, but I still knew my way around things so I ended up buying my first 3D printer, which was an Ender 3 Pro at the time. And it's set up in my kitchen aisle and counter because that's the space that I had for the time being [00:01:00] and ended up printing it out.
And the funny part about that is if anyone is familiar with Michigan or the cities. That was actually also my 1st sale completely. Out of the blue, the guy I posted it to a Facebook group, I was like, now I finally have a place to mount my system. And someone's Hey, would you sell that? And I'm like.
 Don't know. I've never done this before. So we settled on a price and have out of places. He lived in Escanaba. If anyone's familiar with Michigan, it is a low key, famous town up in the piece. So of all places, that's where he was. And then from then on the rest is history, And now I do, that was actually designed in Katia, which is an engineering software. I don't use that anymore. I've migrated over to Fusion now, which I enjoy a lot more. It's easier to figure out new things because everyone's using it. But yeah, that's kinda how all that started. 
And so it sounds like you got into it out of a little bit of necessity for yourself, but when you designed that first item for yourself did you have any idea at 

[00:02:00] that point that you were even gonna get into expanding it to the version that you did, or did it just like evolve from there? 
It really just evolved, because I'll be honest, of all the systems I have now the ones that I started out with, I had like my Wii U, and that was the newest system I had since the original Xbox. So I skipped a lot of generations. and then my previous systems were my Nintendo 64 and my Genesis.
The ones that I grew up on was the ones that I had. And then I started, I did some Wiimote wall holders. that's what really kickstarted everything. Cause, the Wiimote was in black. That was easy, but then I started getting into doing all the different characters for Nintendo.
Mario, Peach, Luigi, Bowser, everything under the sun everything had its own color. Color matching really took hold, and I don't know how many different companies and filaments I've went through because you can't trust the pictures. And yeah, that really started evolving it. And it was nice because then people [00:03:00] could display their entire WeMo character collection of six or seven different characters, and they're all matched and everything.
And it was really cool. So that's really what kickstarted that part of it. And then, yeah, of course it evolved from there to where I'm at now, which I have, I'm not even going to count how many systems I have actually. That'd be a while. That was going to be my next question, actually. I was curious how many systems you had because if people aren't familiar with your content or haven't seen your content, it's not every video that you show them off, but you have this crazy display of all these different consoles, and it's like the most nostalgic thing ever, It's not going to do justice unless this is shown. And the cool part is I actually have some led lights. Hopefully they want to work because half of them busted. So I can solder them back together. 
So this is everything from the. Sega stuff up top. This is really hard to do backwards. But yeah, this is actually my newest addition right here. This is actually not even a first party item. It's Hyperkin, but it's like a SNES [00:04:00] handheld. So I grabbed that. 
Was this mount here, and if I can take some of these out of the way, you could be able to see it better. This was actually not my design. This design was done by someone called the Jeff Chen. That's his username, but he made this to where it looks like the GameCube is falling into place in a sense. But he only made this version.

He made one for the the Game Boy player, which this one's attached to. So he did make two technical versions, but for one system, unfortunately, he never actually expanded the idea. And that's where I decided to take over. So actually the other one I made, I took out there, but so this is like the SNES one and then I also have the mini, And then behind it is the SNES mini. 
I have the PlayStation version and actually have the mini. I don't know where those are. I think I'm getting ready to take pictures of them. So I have the mini and the other PlayStation and then up here is Dreamcast and more [00:05:00] PlayStation and it keeps going.
But yeah, this is like the really cool thing that I like is they're called dunk stands. I kept the concept and then I just ran with it. And the cool part is. I went to the Detroit Retro Gaming Show back in April.
I had a customer that had bought one of my dunk stands. I can't remember which console. But I had the PlayStation 1 sitting there. And it was something that I didn't even think about. He came up to me and he says, I have a lot of systems, but let myself space, my story too.
he says, the cool part with the dunk stands are because they're not flat. He says, you can only put them side by side. But because they angle, you can actually like slot them together and get on your shelf, which I didn't even think of that concept. I was this is cool. Let's roll with it.
Yeah. So he has that. And I was like, I've been able to fit two or three systems on every shelf because everything is stacked and it looks even neater. So that was a cool thing. I was like, Hey, I met one of my customers. This is so cool. And but yeah, [00:06:00] that's and then honestly at the top, there's all the There's more, it keeps going, there's more.
All the N64 controllers that are common enough, I think Nintendo, I think it got, I don't know how many there are, 15? Maybe? Yeah, and, so it's it's nuts. But, that's yeah that's where it's gone to now. The the part of it that's I don't know, I don't want to say rough about it, but with retro, is that there is an end to the tunnel.
I you can only make for so many systems so many times. And I, realize that now. So I've expanded into other areas that are outside of gaming. While I still like to do the gaming thing, I'm expanding. And then I noticed some of those creations are coming back into the gaming realm because I've done it so much.

So now it's like a bunch of collabs that, it's fun, honestly. It's different, but it's fun. But yeah that's that big collection. So around me. So this guy obviously pops out of nowhere because everyone wonders what's a big black eyed tootie. This is I don't know. So here, let me start with this guy.[00:07:00] 
So this you might be familiar with. This took TikTok by storm last year, completely accidental. I did not plan for this. But it in two weeks amassed a 13 million views, which is insane. That's wild. Yeah. This happened while I was like at work most days.
 The cool part is though, is that it got to the point where I could not keep up with orders. Like I was probably getting in 20 orders a day of these. And this was a 40 hour print when I started and I was on enders.
The cool part is though, because of that my digital side got kick started really fast because I needed help. All the colors I had printed that were colors from 3D Max. I was already on a Facebook group for them.
So I was like, hey, these people are already going to have all the colors to do this. They probably have the printers. So I made a big post on there saying, hey, look, if you're looking to make some side cash, I need some help. I can send you orders. I have people messaging me and I cannot keep up. I'm already a week behind because I can't make things go [00:08:00] faster.
And I ended up getting a guy, I think actually from Arizona and then there was another guy in Georgia. There was two people that really kickstarted off with me. And between the two of us, within two weeks we had sold over a hundred of these. Some, they did a lot more, like they had more capacity than I did.
so then I started a Patreon for that. They paid me like 10 a month and they made, I think we made like almost 9, 000 together. So no, I didn't get a lot of kickback from it, but the kickback wasn't the commission as it was the views and, that part of it.
Yeah. The Black Eyed Susie, actually, that, I made that a few months ago, due in springtime again, which is actually when the original came out. This one was cool, it was like 19 petals, but as you can tell on the bottom, some of the petals didn't want to fit in. They this thing is actually not completely fastened down either.

some of the petals didn't completely go in, and some of them were actually about ready to fall out, because I just, I didn't glue this together, How the heck do you ship something [00:09:00] like that? That's what I was wondering too. It's a big piece. 
Yeah, every time I ship one of these they go in like a nine by nine box and I had a tutorial on Instagram and TikTok on how to put them together, best practice. They do have a cord. So if you're wondering, these would actually charge your switch. And since it has a cord, you can plug in a USB C hub, and you can actually HDMI out, and it will be a full fledged dock.
Oh, that's cool. So it's like a pass through system. when that one was going popular, I actually had someone request and say, Hey, a Piranha Plant version would be cool. And I'm thinking, yeah, you're right, that'd be cool. So if I turn over here's the Piranha Plant, and honestly, The way this went together, this one actually broke, so it's mine permanently But the way the head of this goes together, this is not a multi color print.
Oh, okay. And if you look at it, you're thinking, how the heck do I get these two pieces together? The cool part is, I actually have a spare head back here, so Now I can [00:10:00] show you. It's hard to see, but this is actually split right down the middle. At the very base of it, it's about a one millimeter thick and a little wider, so the, when you print it, it will print like this.
So you can actually take your fingers and you can break it apart and then clasp it over top of the white and it will not come off. Like when it first happened, I was like, holy crap, that actually worked. And I was like, I'm still super excited over how this worked and this was over a year ago and to this date, it's this is still like the single coolest concept ever that I've made.
Because like I said, there was no gluing to it. It just snapped like perfectly and I was like So yeah, that was like one of my little giddy moments when I was making this thing I would have a hundred percent guessed that was multicolor I it's it probably even for a time standpoint of printing it out.
It probably makes it way faster that It's a lot quicker when you're not switching colors and when I made that I didn't have a multi color printer even to this day my only multi color is my a1 over here I have four p1 s's and none of them are [00:11:00] multi color because I design stuff And I always keep in mind that when multi color first came out if I wanted to print a lot of stuff I couldn't So when I make stuff that comes in pieces on purpose.

So that way anybody could print it. Anybody could put it together. It's a very important thing to me that it goes together easily. I love that. I, anything that goes together, it requires. Way more brain power than I got. I'm like, sorry, but this sucks. No one's going to want to put this together because I don't even want to put it together. 
And I'm a pretty handy person. Yeah, for you, I have to imagine having, coming on, coming from printers that are more like unders and things like that. It's probably from personal experience. Cause that's B2 as my first printer. And without having multicolor and having tolerances that weren't great and all that stuff, anything that was difficult to put together.
It was a really big project at the time. So yeah, for you, it's probably coming from experience. it drops your confidence when you can't get something together that you're like, this should be easy. Yeah. [00:12:00] I actually had a this was a while back. 
I think I was looking for something for my nieces and someone had 3D printed an entire Pokemon board game and they designed it and everything and I downloaded it and this goes back to what I refer to as printing etiquette, which is make sure to design things that can print easily and go together easily.
That's just the term I Call it. But the way the pieces were together required a lot of supports, because of some of the ways the pieces join, and I'm like, this I like what you got, but the execution of designing this to be printed, I'm sorry This is not working for me. As a designer, I literally redesigned from scratch the entire thing.
All the pieces, it looks very similar. I added some parts to it. I even, it was a Pokemon thing, I even developed my own Pokeballs. I even made the joints and everything to where they'll open and they sit in it. 
I gave it to my nieces. Like you had the electric, you had the grass, the water, the fire, everything. And I used the low poly [00:13:00] figurines that were on a thingiverse. And then I just threw them into my CAD, I made a hole in the bottom of them, and then I made a little stand to put them on so they were like, things that you could actually go around the board with.
And it was a really cool thing that Collabs was like, you have to go around, you have to capture each one, there was a dice that you had to roll against. Whoever was in charge of the other power. So it was this battle and it's meant 

to be played with four. You can play it with two, but it's a lot more fun with four people. 
Then in the middle, you had Mewtwo and you all had to go battle Mewtwo. So it was very Pokemon 2000s themed. I absolutely loved it. And it was fun to play. I've changed the rules a little bit. The guy that originally Invented it made his own rules for it. So I just took his rule.
He's actually from Germany So a lot of his rules were like in German or really bad broken English. Yeah nothing on him. I mean My German would be more broken than I could imagine if I tried, right? So I a lot of it I like rewrote and it was like a really fun cool game They still have it to this day.
They still play it every once in a while, but it was really fun It was one of those [00:14:00] like really fun things. I was like, hey, let's redesign this just easier to make
one thing I do have is I've been doing more different bases for the plant stands. This is actually another base that the core goes into. There's the castle with the three and the door, and I have one that's just the single castle. It's right here. This is just a single castle, cause, Mario Castle, we're going together.
This one had the door, I did eventually, originally have the Switch logo put on here, but I took it off, I was like, yeah, I don't really need that, it takes away from it. And if, I don't know if you can see, but this was actually done with those new plates that you can get, so it came out cool that just cause, it's for the fun part of it.
But I had a patron, because I have a Patreon, I had a patron actually request this guy, which is really cool. So he wanted a question mark box and a cloud top. So this was something that was completely different, but I love it when people request things. Especially if it's something like, yeah, we can make this extra.
[00:15:00] A lot of these extra designs the only ones that are currently available on Pulse are like the original and All other ones are currently through my Patreon. I'm getting ready to do a mass update to that. Keep in mind, if you got it now, I will be upping the price of it, because there's a lot more pieces to it, and I'll be reorganizing all the files and stuff like that.

Some other things that I got into, I don't have the original here, because the original is hilarious. So as a kid, I grew up with an Etch A Sketch. Oh, okay, yeah. He drew it out of blue, okay? Yeah. And the, what I did was I saw oh shoot, what's his name Mystic Mystic Mesh, I think? He changed his name about a year ago. 
Oh, I know who you're talking about, yes. But he started getting into the TV Nintendo Switch TV stands. And I thought, I was like, okay, those are really cool. And I was like, I looked at him like, why does this look like an Etch A Sketch to me? So I designed an Etch A Sketch version that had the knobs and had the little antenna and it was an Etch A Sketch TV.
And when I designed that, I'm like, I could go a little different direction with this. And Keeping with [00:16:00] some other themes, so this is Gengar version that I did. And it's just got a simple stand on it. I did, I had a Gengar, a Pikachu. I did an Eevee. That was really fun. Because I even did the stand is even the tail for Eevee.
Like, all that would incorporate into it and it was really cool. Pikachu guy. Actually the happiest one that I made is this one right here. This is Meryl. The cool part is, it's got the Meryl tail. I love that. Designed to sit, using the tail. Then when I did this I got some felt strips.
So the felt strips I designed into it so the switch will fit like perfectly. Yeah. The only thing that was like the weird issue was to me was at the bottom. There was not much space on the bottom. So sometimes your cord got kinked a little bit. I bought some 90 degree adapters that I plan on somehow fitting in here.
So that way you can slide your switch in here and then your plug will come in from the back. it's got to be functional. It's got to work nice. It's got to work right and not break anything. [00:17:00] But yeah, those are some other things that. I got into I did some hardware related stuff that was still gaming.
The first one I actually came out with was this guy. these are legit GameCube ports. Like it will actually play GameCube controllers on a switch. Okay. That's pretty cool. the light like lights up like the system and everything. I got a handle. I ended up making my own logo for it.
So it had like its own logo and yeah, it's like a full fledged doc. It's really cool. The only issue with this is like I came out with this, and then all of a sudden, all the third party people started coming out with GameCube controllers that 

were wireless to the Switch. I was like, thanks! This was a really cool idea, but it killed it for me. 
Yeah. But the cool part is that people that do Switch tournaments they use the same adapter that's in here to go to Switch. So this is like an all in one solution. To me, it's a handle. It's pretty light. Yeah. But yeah, it's, there's wiring in here. It lights up. 
And then, of course, when I did the GameCube version, I was like, I gotta [00:18:00] do a Nintendo 64 version. that one actually got backburned like twice. Hardware was hard to find. Finding GameCube, like third party USB adapter, which is what's in here. was easy. And 64, on the other hand, I found out was a nightmare.
It's especially ones that when I first made one, it took me an hour to build one because I had to cut wires, re solder wires. And my first thought is I don't want to try to sell 50 of these. This part of the labor kind of sucks on this. I don't want to have to do that. It's something that's almost like bad if they sell a lot of you're like, I'm not sure if I'm ready to take this on.
I've had a lot of that. That's I really like this at the same time. Man, that's sick to print. Yeah. It's it's that balance as a designer and a printer. It's I want to make this, but. Going through the process of designing it, I'm thinking, okay, how is this going to print?
Is it going to need supports? I take all that in consideration when I build, when I design my stuff, I'm not saying anything about some of the creators, but they'll make these really cool models. Yeah. And then you look at this and you're like, that thing has got two [00:19:00] kilograms worth of supports on a half kilogram model.
I'm like, were you really considering printing this? Yeah. I can say that, but it drives me nuts sometimes when I come into that and I'm like, this is really cool. If it was maybe a resin print, because it prints differently, but if it's FDM, It's not going to look the best because the supports, they do what they do.
They leave behind bad artifacts on the bottoms. Of course. I think that's, looking at your designs, what's really clear is you really seem to think through every single aspect of it. Just what you were showing with the switch stands just like the detail of not wanting the cord to get kinked on it.

I think details like that. I find in a lot of 3D printing files. I feel like are so often overlooked. I think that's what's really unique about your files. Like this one, it comes out this if I can take this off without shooting all over the place. There we go. Yeah, like that was like. It was 19 pedal and I have another version that I made that is 15. 
And I did 15 on purpose, one, and like I said, this is looking at the [00:20:00] functionality of it because I do have the bottom here where the stem plugs in. So it's if I do an even number, then I'm going to have a pedal on the bottom that stem plugs in. it's going to take away from where it goes in and all the tolerances are going to get mashed up.
So by doing an odd number, I split the difference on the bottom of that and I don't have to worry about that. And then I made a 15 pedal version because the problem with a 19, it's not an easily divisible number and you're thinking, what the heck does math have to do with this? I made a 15 and with the 15, I was able to do 3 different colors, 5 pedals a piece.
And going looking at the math of it, I had a picture of it and everything and I also made the pedals like slightly different sizes.I was like, okay, this turned out to be cool because now you can have three different colors.
You can choose your colors. You can rearrange them however you want. You have five colors. You have three colors. You have one color. That was the whole point is it was a make it what you want to be. This wasn't exactly that. This is, see, there goes one of them. But, it was one of those really cool things like that.
Now going on with this. This was something I [00:21:00] did. I made these to go on there. This actually has a twist lock that I ended up developing. Because you gotta glue it together. And no offense, I suck at clamping things sometimes. This has gotta be simple enough to glue together where it can somewhat hold itself together at the same time.
Honestly, when I do these I lay them flat on the table and then I actually put a couple of filament boxes. So that way it will stay flat. Yes, I thought about, like, all of this has got to go together. And then, like, when I put this on this will actually hang over top of the table.
But, yeah, it was. It was really cool. I'm gonna tell you what these right here. These are the biggest pain to get correctly was the Joy Con slides The weird 

part is my Ender 3 pros or my BQB one printers could not get the tolerances of this correct No matter what I did, huh, and I did I had some Sovo SVO sixes then pulling it off correctly I have still, I still have the, I've used the [00:22:00] same slicer, everything, just something didn't want to. 
That's all. Interesting. Does that model print without supports? Like that? You can print without supports. Like I said, these are designed to where you don't have to. This one, I don't do support, I should, here, let me take this apart real quick.
This piece here, I don't do supports, I do a brim on the bottom, so that will help. Because, Trust me, even myself, I've had these where they've gotten literally this tall, and broke. But this guy on the other hand I did do a tree support on the back, and then one under here.
It's still very little support for as weird shaped as this is, but with that brim, and I do a Z hop to make sure nothing hits going across. Yeah. The cool part is that I can do these in like a 50 percent infill, which is pretty hefty, but at the same time, some of the pieces are, like the walls of these are small, which I want to work on thickening that up with the cable still being able to go through and [00:23:00] everything.
But yeah, these are like my And to tell you the truth, this was one of those designs that I was like, yeah, I think I want to make that. And then it just blew up and I was like, no, that was going to happen. I have other things that I've spent hours on and they moved absolutely nowhere. This guy just wanted to take over social media.
I remember when that thing blew up, I remember it was every creator I knew was making, was printing those and was making it, it had to be crazy. I think my TikTok account was like two months old and had four videos on it. But it was like, had the 13 million views. It came out to Twelve. 12, 300 followers. Like this all happened in two weeks. There was like 1. 5 million likes. It was nuts. So I was like, and I didn't know anything about like TikTok.
I was like, yeah, I'm on TikTok. I want to grow my channel a little bit. And then, yeah, I did that. It was with this guy. It's a crazy introduction to being on TikTok is that much traffic all at once. Oh my gosh. It was overwhelming.
It was really cool, but it was overwhelming. Even still to this day, I look back and think. Oh my gosh, those two weeks were [00:24:00] so freaking hectic. 

Because the traffic kept coming, and I still work a standard like, 40 hour job. So there's a lot going on. But yeah, it's been fun. I like doing the retro stuff. 
It's fun. I like doing it because it's a very niche market. But at the same time, the community behind it's really cool. They always love to talk. I love talking about their stuff, all the rare things they find. So everyone's usually oh, that's really cool.
Does it do this? Can it do this? Can you make it as a designer thinking? Yeah, we can pull that off. I designed it. I made it. I didn't modify it. But yeah, there's, and then actually right here is one of my, this was the first dunk stand I actually designed myself. Oh, okay. This one's the one that came out. Cool. So it sits like this. Oh, nice. And the cartridge mount. I actually had designed a long time before that, but it brings like the whole thing together. Oh, I see. That sits in there. Yeah. Yeah, [00:25:00] it was the cool part was like, that one, it's nice because this one I can actually spin around, and it's well balanced, that was another thing, developing the dunk stands and making sure they balance. that part was tough. There's a lot that I think goes into these models that hearing you talk through it, there's so many little pieces to it that I definitely didn't realize and I think a lot of people didn't realize.
But yeah, as simple as just like getting the balance point on that cracked head to be, I'm sure, how many prototypes do you go through like on the initial design? It all depends. The cool part is I'll actually, when I'm finished with, like that stand there, for instance, was the first time I did it.
I actually went and laid out every single prototype piece that I had. And I took a video so you could see how that came about. some people don't realize there's a lot of tolerance issues. Like just moving something a half a millimeter is the difference between it working and not working.
Like it gets down to that nitty gritty of I printed I'm like, Oh, that didn't fit. Things weren't as quick as they are now. You actually had to wait a few hours. Yeah. Yeah. It was Oh, that didn't work. I got to move it this way. Or you're still moving.
You're [00:26:00] like, why is this not working? I got to go the other direction. And I've had that happen so many times. It's oh my gosh, this would have taken half the time if I was paying attention to what I was doing. Yeah. And I was looking at things in reverse. And it, yeah, it goes through that a lot.

But in the end when you're like, it fits, it works, it actually works. It's gotta be the best. For instance, the one I had for the Sega Saturn, I made one. And for those that are familiar with the Sega Saturn logo and their defense, it looks terrible. 
Oh, they have, the sphere and it looks like someone bent wire going through it I was like, What is, I know this was made back in like the nineties, but I was like, come on now, this, it looks like someone like my six year old drew a gray crayon around it. This looks terrible.
And so I took the opportunity to design my own, say this Sega Saturn logo like a modernized look that just, it was more OCD pleasing. Can I put it that way? Like it actually like it looked [00:27:00] like a planet, not this jumble of us on there. Yeah. 
So yeah, that was the thing that was really cool, but it was such a heavy system that I had to build that angle going up so far before it would balance enough, and even now it kicks up just a little bit, but it doesn't fall off the stand like it's enough.
But yeah, Actually had one that I had to design a keystock for. It was for the Sega Master System, because the sucker's a f ing half long. And I went to put it on there, and because it's not, The GameCube is probably the easiest system it could have designed for the whole sucker is symmetrical like there is no center of gravity issues with that whatsoever.
And then the N64 was like, okay, there's a little bit of center of gravity issues, but only weighs like five pounds. The Sega Saturn, I swear to God that thing weighs 50. It's just so heavy. And then when I went to the Master System, it was like, okay, you're a foot and a half wide and you're only like eight inches deep.
This is a And I actually had to when I got the stand done, I'm like, it's center. Gravity is good, but it's not working. It's it would twist off and fall. So I actually had to go into [00:28:00] design this key stock that was like this. And it was using a groove in the original system for an expansion, I think, that they never made.
Okay. Like a lock key. So I made a key that would fit in there and then would fit in the stand and essentially bind them together and not fall. Yeah, there's been like little things like that. They're like, how we make this work? Is there 

something from the system that I can use to make this work? 
And, yeah, there's a lot of little things. The Sega Dreamcast is the one I have not made a dump sample for. Because there is nothing on the bottom of that system to connect to that is, if you. That's that slot covers any way the feet come out, like, all of those little things go in to try to make something fit perfectly.
Actually, I'll show you this right here. So on this 1 this is what the bomb that looks like. You have to remove the foam pad for the foot and then these go into the vent slot to keep it from sliding around. Yeah, this. 
At first, actually, this sucker was like a block. There was no cutout. It just went straight down. It looks like those stupid blocks that they use at the [00:29:00] dentist for propping your jaw open that's what it reminded me of. Yeah, PTSD from one of those times. Anyway, but yeah, and this, and like I said, it's meant, if I can get it, there it goes.
Yeah, you slide it and it fits perfectly. Yeah, it's very seamless. That's what it looks like on the bottom. Nice. They're all meant to fit that way. Even this little guy here has got a slot in the back, which is hard to show. But controller port in the back, slides in the memory card, things like that.
Yeah, now, for you you've designed so many of these up to this point. Maybe it was the one that you just talked me through, but was there, is there any one of these that stands out that you were just like, this was the most difficult or just gave you the most troubles? In terms of like the dunk stands, like I showed you, like those ones, or just any creation in general?
Yeah, I guess just like any creation that comes to mind for you. Anything that really gave you a hard time. Cause you seem pretty good at overcoming a lot of the weird problems and stuff. That was a lot of practice. Weirdly enough at this point, the one that was I'm trying to think, the one that was toughest to [00:30:00] design for.
Okay, actually, you know what, there is one that was toughest to design for, and that was the dunk stand for the Super Nintendo. The reason for that is The bottom of the system had those weird squiggly walls, and the squiggly walls were, it was, I actually made a video on TikTok about this, I was like, this is one of the most not exactly hardest, unique, whatever you want to call it, but I was like, that was the first time I found out how to use the loft command, and 

Fusion, which is where you take two sketches and it links them together to make a solid. 
So if you want a square with a circle on top, it'll like, link it together. I had one squiggly line and then above that, I had another one that needed the same. Like tangent tolerances, but once I was like bigger and that, Oh my gosh. Now that I remember that I was bringing back memories.
Cause I remember going through that. I'm like, man, this is a tedious process. And then like, when I finally got it, like it took me a while. I finally got to fit perfectly. It was like, finally, like I do [00:31:00] never want to do this again. No, I like the stands, but this is definitely one that like, cause the corner fit in the slot, but because the corner had squigglies, And the squigglies were tapered.
So they weren't flat where they could hit against each other. They're tapered, so if it wasn't correct, the sucker would slide right off. Oh man. It was definitely one of those. 
 Alright, cool. Here we go. So this is the little squigglies that I'm talking about. Okay. Yeah, I can see that. If I can get up close, you'll notice that the top here has a bigger diameter than the one in the bottom.
So while they were like, they're straight up and down, but they were actually tilted out at the top, which is what made that top. yeah, I remember making this now. This was a weird pain. Yeah, I'm bringing flashbacks to this one.
Now it seems like it's all coming back. I remember making some of this stuff and some of it I'm very glad I've done. It's done. It's over with. It's taken care of. But yeah, one of the things that I want to show I did a Kickstarter on it actually back in March. I think I set the bar a little too high for [00:32:00] myself, so it never got fulfilled.
The cool part was it was actually the nintendo 64 version of what I was talking about. Oh, so Previously when I was saying it used to take me an hour to build one of these that's why I got you know backburnered for a while until I went to actually one of my stores that I have a lot of my prints at and they're really cool people about it.
They like my stuff I like my stuff and I actually got to talk with the owner on the last visit it really cool to talk to 'em 'cause they're actually sponsors at the 

gaming convention I went to. That's how I found out about it. 
Nice. But when I was designing this, it said it took me an hour to do it because of the adapter I used inside required a lot of finagling. And then I found another adapter from another company. And when I first saw it, I was like.
Okay, because the first adapter had a 6 foot USB cable. You ain't fitting that in this sucker. So I had to cut the cable down to 6 inches. To make it work and even then the adapter was only 2 port. So I had to fit 2 adapters and so yeah, trying to fit 12 feet worth of [00:33:00] USB cable in here ain't gonna work.
So I had to cut the adapter down and then on the, like their ports were wider apart. And the wire they had in them would not allow them to smash the closer together, so I would one would work, and the other one had to get desoldered and extended wires, and that's how that whole thing went.
But anyways that was for Mayflash. I don't know if you're familiar with some of their stuff. They're actually the ones that make a lot of what people use in the SwitchCube, yeah, because that's labeled as SwitchCube, the other one was, uses a Mayflash, which is apparently the best latency for an adapter because when you're playing competitive, that stuff, it's very important.
This one actually has two Hyperkin adapters, it came with a, Six inch cable. the cable works. And then when I looked at the front, I realized I had to move the ports just a little bit. But honestly, just using a different manufacturer and everything took me from it taking an hour to make one of these to probably about 10 minutes now.
Because I have no modifications to do besides taking the adapter out of the case. Like I changed the [00:34:00] internals of it, like the inside. It's actually a press fit. You don't even screw the adapters down. You literally set them inside, you put the top, and the top press fits the whole thing together.
Like I said, I made it that way so it's easy to make. Cause, trust me, If I was someone that was like, yeah, I want to print that. And I told you it was going to take you an hour worth of wiring. No, I wouldn't have done it either. The cool part with this guy is because of the way this happened, I actually have a USB port now on the bottom for expansion, which is something I've been working on the side.

For those that are familiar with the Nintendo 64 stuff, anyone that's watching, I actually made, so this is what I made. And like a fluorescent orange and the black on the bottom. This is actually the same type that I sent to Gamerammer. She actually did a review of one of these for me. So that was really cool. 
She's very well known in the community for retro stuff. She's got a whole basement deck. Dwarfs my house in terms of anything you can see or find. It's hard to imagine anything could dwarf your collection because it's like a museum in there. She's got everything from [00:35:00] video game kiosks to posters to Oh, wow.
Yeah, she's, and she's got it all is almost like a celebrity in some of the retro gaming community. So she'll get invited to a bunch of the different conventions, which is really cool. Yeah. Like I said, this had the expansion port on the bottom, so I was actually able to make a expansion piece.
Which is cool, because those that are familiar with the Nintendo 64 could be like, Dude, that looks like that Japanese edition, which is exactly what it's made to look like. This is actually, you pull it out, and it's got doors for Switch games and stuff. Oh, nice, yeah. And, tolerances, once again Very buttery smooth tolerances, yeah.
Yes, it will be buttery smooth tolerances. It will work the way it's supposed to. But yeah right here is a the port, so that actually fits in here perfectly. And the feet like fit perfectly and the slots like it. I can just hear by the way that's clicking together. I can just hear how like perfect pieces sounds good.
It's yeah, everything is meant to fit [00:36:00] perfectly. When it comes to that, because I was like, I've made controller stands that when I made them the controller would slide around a little bit like that. It's going to stay there. And yeah, I'm very particular when it comes to tolerances and how things are made, because it's going to stay there.
It's going to look nice. If an earthquake comes, the only reason it's coming off. I also made a mini version 2. This has just got one adapter, no specialties. This guy actually has a full USB hub in the back. I can turn into the light. There we go. So it's got like HDMI output USB.
So this is actually a full fledged dock with N64 controllers. And I sell it for about the same price as you would buy a replacement dock. But you're getting so much more because it's also portable, like it'll run off of your switch, so you can 

take this with you, put your switch in it, to parties, and you don't have to plug it into a TV, like it's completely portable solution, so it's like really cool. 
This is probably one of my more happier things that, like, when I got those adapters, I'm like, oh, my gosh, this might actually work. It's not going to sit on the back burner anymore. But yeah, this is there's a lot of [00:37:00] different stuff that I work on. Now, the weird part is a little bit of away from the retro gaming is like the other areas I've been hitting.
If you follow on TikTok a little bit, you'll know that 3D Print Pros released that Gyro Fidget Spinner that went really popular. I love the idea, and then as a designer, I was like, okay, I want to make this. Not exactly better, but I want to take it into a different direction and I actually got one.
So this is one like theirs, but this also spins this way. So I took their design and then I incorporated like a 3D printed like bearing. So it has everything in it and even has some designs like this has got lightning bolts. This could technically be like a Pokemon Pikachu or if you like the flash.
I had a plan for what I wanted to do. This was like phase one was like, get the bearing to work. Phase two, which was something that I noticed a lot for fidget spinners is they're not marketed to guys. Can tell you of 1 spinner in my, in the entire time I've seen him that.
A guy could pick this up and honestly not get picked on about it. You [00:38:00] think? I feel like they're more marketed towards men. I never saw a lot of them were, like, either in, pretty colors, which is fine and all, but there's gotta be something that when a guy sees this, they're gonna look at it and be like, hey, I like that.
This is for me, yeah. Exactly, this is for me. What I did was, I took the concept of the fidget spinner and then I combined it. With tire tread. That's cool. I like that one. Not only are they tire tread, these are actually mimicked official tires. So if you know someone that works in a tire shop, they can probably tell you exactly what tire tread this is.
The whole point is that and I made them in different sizes. This one to my hand this is pretty big. It's three inches in diameter. So I made them in three different sizes because everyone has a different size. I know the one that was really popular had one size and it was really tiny.

So I was like, okay, this has got to work for someone that's got like kids, for people with smaller hands or bigger hands. And so this is like the bigger hand version. And it was funny, I took this to work and one of the bigger guys that I know of, the dude's 6'7 and [00:39:00] 250, like he's a giant. Oh, big boy. 
Yeah. And I was like, hey, I want, cause you're the prime, you're the prime person to test this out. And I literally put this in the palm of his hand, I'm like, yeah, my hands aren't that big. And he was playing with it. I know he doesn't play with fidget spinners, but I was like, does this feel like a fidget Like, that it belongs and he's playing with it.
He's this is whatever this is, he's it's my size. I was like, yes, that's what I wanted. That's really what I wanted. I had ones that look like if I get the light, it looks like the BFGoodrich KO2 tire. For those that know, it's the most popular truck tire on the road. And I've done 3 different versions of them, but that was, like, the new thing that I went with.
 Do plan on taking them further. I had this is another one that I made. This looks different because it's actually made to press fit a mechanical fidget spinner bearing. So this one, like you spin it and it will go. Oh, this is just like an actual ball bearing inside of it. So this one, when it prints, obviously prints this way, but it's printed to fit like a fidget spinner bearing.
You can [00:40:00] press fit a bearing in here. Enough to where at some points I had to use a mallet, but I didn't want it to come out. The whole point was like, you're not going to spin it and the thing just fly apart. So yeah, another thing, it's going to fit.
It's going to fit well, it's going to, and yeah, you press fit the bearing, there's two pieces that go inside and it will spin. The only reason I don't have a functional one right now is because a fellow maker of mine took a bunch of my stuff to a flea market about 20 miles away and sell them for me as a favor.
Which is really cool, I enjoy it. The other thing I made, and this was joked about on TikTok by Brady and a couple others, was my Pool noodle swords. I don't know if you saw that or not. Yes. Yes. I knew it was coming because I showed it to a coworker of mine. He just looks at me, gives me that look.
I'm like, I know the look you're giving me. I know the type of person you are. I was like, don't tell me. I already know. But for kids, I sold four minute work to kids and one of them, his daughter's already beat the crap out of the noodle. 

That's fine. It's meant to be replaceable. For those that don't [00:41:00] know, this is what it is. 
This is the hill, and then, here, I'll take it apart because everyone's going to want to know what the heck the TV part on it is. This is what the end of it looks like. You're fine, you can go wander, I don't care. But, this is, yeah, a lot of people do like PVC and they slide off, so this is, it doesn't come apart when your kids are whacking each other with it.
Trust me. I have 2 kids and they love these things. I love them because it's safe fun. They can whack each other. I can whack them. Yeah, all good, clean fun. Yes, very much. But, yeah, I have other hilts that I'm trying to design for that. This has been another fun thing because I have an art shop downtown that I put some of my stuff on a lot of my gaming stuff can sell well, but they don't get in customers that are like that.
So now I've done the fidget spinners. The swords and I even made my own business card pocket holders, which are really cool. It was a design that I took from someone else and ran with it and did them a little differently. But I don't have 1 of those around and that's okay because they're all there.
Oh, yeah, that's the gist of a lot of stuff. It's still going to have over 100 [00:42:00] different items that I've actually created. Which is nuts. I never thought I'd ever get to that, milestone, so to speak, of having over a hundred different products. you have a lot of stuff that falls into the vintage gaming category, but it's other categories too, I was curious, Javi, your designs are very well thought out and they're very well created.
How long did it take you in terms of working in different 3d modeling softwares to get to the point where you like really felt comfortable to make models on the level that you're making them now?
Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, when I was in, I did a little bit of college for cab, but I was in high school. I started on auto 2001 was like, the original. But then I went to I did mechanical CAD and architectural. My high school actually did allow me to do 4 years worth of CAD classes.
Technically, I was 15. And got into all that cool part is it's also where I met my wife was in our high school. Nice. So it was that part of it too. And then I did like I went to college to do some CAD. The only issue was I'm in Michigan. The only careers around the time that really developed CAD were over in Wisconsin 

[00:43:00] at Green Bay. 
So I was like. At the current time was like this. I don't currently see where this could take me somewhere. It's gonna take me somewhere outside of, I like being in my home state, have family here, all that stuff. So I didn't like progress in it as much at that time because of where I saw the career going at that moment was that and I'm Michigan tech, which is way up.
Was the other place I was like, okay, that's a nice 5 hour drive. Yeah, I don't really feel like being that far away. And so at that time, then, when I did the college classes. They bored me. Even the CAD classes bored me because I'm like, I was already in four years into it.
I knew so much stuff and yeah, I might be learning a new program, but I'm just learning new ways to create things. I already knew how to create. I was so far ahead in that I was like I'm bored. I'll be honest. 1 of the classes I did. I had a straight zero in the class because I didn't do any of the work because everything was like.
[00:44:00] Draw three lines. Draw a circle. Draw a rectangle. And then my teacher finally came up to me like halfway through the class, and she says, you haven't turned anything in. She says, you're always doing something, but you've never turned anything in. So I looked at her and said, okay, what are all the assignments?
 Did all the assignments in a day. I couldn't test out of any of them because they use different software, so it's not like I knew any of the tools specifically.
But yeah, that ended for a while. When Halo 2 came out, I was part of some of the Halo 2 modding community, which is really cool for Xbox. So some of the models, like people would ask me if I could design a model that had to be like a low poly, cause back then systems were not as robust as they are now, so I did a little bit of that here and there to keep updated.
But honestly, like before I did the 3d printing, it had probably been at least 10 years since I modeled. So it was a while, but yeah, that really pushed me into it. And it's fun because [00:45:00] now I am so a little outside of what I do I used to have 14 printers at one point, that's a lot of printers.
Anytime I hear people with that many printers, it's just always going in the back 

of my head of all the maintenance that has to go on with all those printers. Okay, so on the maintenance part, I'm a person that's a DIY, so I like to tinker with stuff, so having Ender 3 Pros wasn't that bad for me, because I was like, it broke down, and it was one of those me designing stuff, like it's got to have tolerances, it's got functionality, so I would actually go through the printer and be like, okay, what's screwing up? 
How can I fix it at the same time? Can I make it better than when it broke? So that was always going through my head. I actually have two of printers that I've had for awhile and they're sitting over there because they're waiting on me to be doctor and. Upgrade them with components that they'd never seen before just because I want to see what I can push out of them.
Yeah. I did a video a while back where I took an Ender 3 Pro and I pushed the speed to the limitation that the firmware were allowed and it never clogged. That was [00:46:00] the coolest thing ever. It went at 200 millimeters per second on an Ender 3 Pro and it never clogged. 
It was when bamboos first came out. I was like, I didn't have the money for a bamboo. I was like, okay, you know how much I could push this thing? Because what it was only one thing that I changed. One was the heat break. The heat break in the under three pro required the tube to go all the way through and to touch the nozzle.
Worst design in the world. I'm sorry, but that thing caused so many people headaches that probably got on a 3d printing just for that one error because you had to get the tube seat the nozzle perfectly. And if not, then the seal wasn't I'm sure you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. No, unfortunately, things that everybody hated.
Why is it clogging? I just fixed it. No, you didn't fix it. Not yet. Anyways, I go back. You got to clean it out. Get the. Okay. Yeah, the PTSD has probably come back for both of us at this point. Yeah, it was brutal. But so I changed out the heat break for a bi metal. I used an all metal at first from MicroSwiss, or [00:47:00] actually it was GCR, it was a MicroSwiss clone.
Tell you what, that was the worst all metal hotend I've ever experienced. The way they put that together was terrible. it was a proprietary heat break in it, and I hated it. I used four of them at one point, they all left my printers after a certain point in time. So these work really good!

But, they require me to do things I shouldn't have to do I actually, I made a YouTube video that's still getting a lot of views, which was like, literally putting mineral oil inside of the hotend to get it to lubricate, cause the tube wasn't there for the filament little things like that I figured out, and people are like, I can't figure this out, I'm like, put a little drop of mineral oil in there, it will season it, and then, Everyone's you shouldn't have to do that. 
But I do, and it works. That's the point. You might have to. Lucky you! I'm not the lucky one in this case. Yeah. I was new at the time, but I had a micro Swiss direct drive that I put on there. Oh yeah. It was, there was so many things exactly like that. I shouldn't have had to do it, but I had to do it every single time I ran the print.
And it was, some people love them, but it wasn't for me. You [00:48:00] remember the heat break was actually a coupler. Yeah, that was okay on microswiss and they probably thought there were geniuses on my end. I know it was like why couldn't you just design it like everybody else's were actually had a heat break that went through the whole thing.
Otherwise like I don't know how many times I stripped out that stupid grub screw from taking that thing out and putting it back in. Yeah, I actually got one that was machined incorrectly and it would always clogged because the collar would push it too far. It would never seal. That was the last one that I bought and that was like number six.
But after that I'm like, no, I'm done. That was the last straw. So I went back to the original hot end, replaced the heat break with a biometal, which For a 3D printer, it was like 18 for the heat break, so it was a little bit more on the expensive side for me, but I was like, okay, I bought one, and then I found out about volcano nozzles.
Oh, yeah. you look like you recognize those. Those things were honestly a game changer way before CHT from Bamboo came out, because all they did is take the nozzle and they made it longer. But that's not [00:49:00] the only thing that they did. The heat I actually teach a couple 3D printing classes at my daughter's school, so I have connections, and they'll teach us some of the, and this is not high school, this is late middle school, it's like 7th and 8th grader.
Yeah, it was really cool. I'll go back into that in a minute. But it was like figuring out the with a standard Ener 3 Pro heat break your thermocouple sat across. But your filament went this way. So you only had one point of contact where 

your heat was consistent. 
Yeah. And with the volcano your thermocouple was this way because your nozzle was so long. And then your, so it was like, it was perfect. Everything was consistent heat. Because of that, I was able to push an Ender 3 Pro to 200 millimeters per second.
 The acceleration and all that was a firmware thing that couldn't be fixed. But it printed fully. It didn't clog at all. It actually didn't have too much for imperfections besides just the walls because that's an acceleration issue when it came to the corners. So all the corners look like it went like this because it wouldn't slow down [00:50:00] and not blob the corners.
But I was like. It worked. It came out. I could use this. Anyone who doesn't know about 3D printing is not going to care that it looks a little different on the edges, but I was like, this works. This is cool. I was able to push it up to 200 millimeters per second. Who else has done this? It changed out a couple things.
But yeah, so on the side of the classes I have, I donated two of my Ender 3 Pros with the volcano on them actually to my daughter's school. And that was always and this is something I'm trying to push at a certain time. Sometimes it's not always the things that you can sell, but it's always the people that you buy from and developing the relationships between those that I've been pushing really hard on and.
Totally blows my mind sometimes how fast the relationship just even in a business aspect will go and for both parties. Yeah I taught a couple classes there and she's in a public charter school, so it's not like a public school, but they get a charter through the university.
So it's still [00:51:00] there are STEM school, so that was like a big thing. So I only had 2 or 3 students that did it. And then later on down the road, because they were having issues with the enders and the volcanoes I ended up buying brand new, this is actually November of last year, I remember because it was a Black Friday sale, I bought them brand new, a pair of BQB1 printers.
They're probably, you're probably not familiar with them because they're not exactly a popular printer, but I'll tell you what, they're the most underrated printer out there, because BQ is actually branded of Big Tree Tech. It's their printer. Okay, I have, I think you have one too, the Panda Touch on yours from 

Big Tree Tech? 
Yeah, I do have a Panda Touch. Just for forewarning right now, I've only just got that thing working properly in the last two weeks, and I've had it for three months, and I hated the thing up until a couple weeks ago, or no, wait. No, that was actually two days ago. Up till two days ago, just by changing a couple of settings on my router.
And I got that to work. Something I didn't know. BambooLabs printers do not like 5GHz [00:52:00] network connections. Interesting, good to know. That was what I couldn't get it to communicate because they wouldn't be on the same band, so I changed something in my router settings and now it works flawlessly.
That's good to hear. Yeah, I love mine actually, but I only run one printer on it. Do you run multiple printers off the one Panda Touch? You can run up to ten. Yeah. Off of one Panda Touch. All four of my P1S's and my A1 run off it. The weird part is, I don't really use it for what a lot of people Because, how can I put this way, it's best use is duplication.
You can get a USB drive, stick it in the side, stick the file. So for those out there, people that do like a lot of the dragons and the articulated prints, this will work awesome for you. You will freaking love it because you can literally go on it. Like load up, if you're doing like single color, load up all your filament for each printer, go on the Panda touch, hit print and do print to all, and they'll all start.
They'll all start printing the same file and it's all matched. for that aspect, it is awesome. Lee Shepherd on TikTok uses it for that. [00:53:00] And that's the biggest feature. You can turn all the lights on and off. simultaneously. It's awesome 
I'm the weird guy. I don't do drag and stuff. I'm the weird dude. I don't do that stuff. I don't know why. I just never was a thing to me. But yeah, that will, so 2. 4 gigahertz network is what your bamboos need to be on and what that needs to be on, even though it can connect to five. Don't do it.
Don't work. Yeah, I found that out the hard way because it was irritating. I'd hook them all up and then they'd all start disconnecting. I'm like, yeah, what the heck? So that's, yeah, it's good to know that. 'cause I hear a lot of people, a lot of people say they have issues with them and that might actually be the issue that people have.

'cause it's once you get it working, it's nice. But yeah, I know a lot of people have issues with connectivity. What I had to do with that was going to my router settings and turn on what was called smart wifi, which means instead of having, I had two wifis, I had the 2.4 and the five 
it creates the 2. 4, but then your router decides what goes on five and what doesn't based on what it's compatible with. So [00:54:00] that's what fixed all that I had one network and it would be like, Oh, you're trying to communicate to this. No problem. 
Big problem. So yeah, that fixed that a lot. And now I have it up there. It's nice because it shows like what's printing. It shows if something had an error, like every error that pops up for bamboo pops up on that side. Yeah, and it has a built in battery. So I know some people that literally have it just sitting beside their computer with their printers in another room and they can monitor it from there, which is really cool.
It has a built in battery that runs off of 5 volts. The only thing I wish that they would have made a legit stand for that. I know you can 3d print stands, but really cool if they develop that part because the plug plugs in the bottom and then the cable kinks a little bit and I don't like that.
It's one of those things. It's going to work. It's got to work. It's not going to break. And when I'm sitting there taking it off and on because the cable is going to kink too much. If only you knew somebody who could design a file for that. Yeah, I could have designed one but I'm like, It's not that important [00:55:00] to me, I'll use that. It takes time, I was like, I could print it, but I was like, eh, for now it just sits on there. And actually this was all rearranged since a few weeks ago because I have a very limited space. For anyone that's watching, welcome to my dining room!
This is all the space that I got, I'm not, I don't get a special room, I freaking wish! I really wish I could display all my game stuff on there, my printing stuff. I would be in heaven, at the same time I probably would never come out of that room. Yeah. But yeah, that was like I said, back to the CAD stuff.
It's it's been fun on Fusion. I like it because it's Autodesk, it's familiar to me. And designing things, I'm Finding out like when I'm at work, I'm thinking about 3d printing and design stuff, which really sucks. I work 10 hour shifts. So when I'm at work, I'm like, I sure hope I remember this when I get home.

And yeah, there'll be things where I'll talk to a few people at work about it. Very few people like not exactly know of 3d printing. The cool part is I've even sold stuff to my work, which was really cool. Knows for our paint department and for anyone so here's a little kicker for those that [00:56:00] are looking to expand out Find a fab shop that does painting because what you can do is design things that will protect an object That's not supposed to be painted on that's attached to something that is supposed to be painted. 
Does that make sense? Yeah, no, yeah, I see what you're saying. So I the piece they're working with I'm not going to go into descriptives, I'm sure there's NDAs of any of that stuff that I'm supposed to talk about, but it had metal, a giant metal shaft on it, and then there's a piece of flat steel and they would literally, not joking, they would do about 60 of these at a time where they paint them black, but the shaft was not to be painted, it had to be fresh.
Cause it had to slide in and out of stuff. So painting would change the tolerances. But anyways, they would literally have someone go through and it'd take them two hours and they would masking tape off every single page. There were like 60 of these suckers lined up. That sounds terrible. Yeah, exactly.
And my, the place I work at, like any other place, pushes efficiency. I'm looking at this, I'm like, this is not efficient by any means possible. One of my coworkers is yeah, he's that took me two hours. It's [00:57:00] two hours to do this crap. And I was like, okay, hold on. It was actually a piece that had a shaft on one side, and it had a shaft with teeth in the middle that was like an oblong, so it was an odd shape, so every part of our shop had computer access, and so I had access to the blueprints, so I literally brought up the blueprints, did the measurements on the computer, took my phone, took a picture of it, which I'm allowed to don't worry, and took a picture of it, and I was like, okay, I can make this better and I might be even able to sell this to the company like, cause if it takes, versus two hours, if it took someone 10 minutes to pull this off, cause they're sitting there and just.
Putting caps on, like, why wouldn't you do this? Yeah, huge money saver too. I literally took one home on a Thursday, because I work four tens, developed it. I didn't take the product home, so I knew that coming back in the shop, I was like, okay, it's either going to fit or it's not, and then I'm going to go back home again.
One of those would take time, and one would fit, but it was, like, [00:58:00] really tight, and I was like, great, that means I gotta change the tolerance by 2. 

Because everything's metric for 3D printing. And I finally got one to fit, and then I went to the other side, and finally got that to fit, I've never seen you guys do that. And then when I talked to the old painters, he's yeah, because we had one tin can and we spray painted 60 of them. That thing got just wet and sucked. He's that's why we don't do that no more. And so it went up the chain. I ended up selling, 60 sets, so they could actually do 60 of these at once, and now it takes about 15 minutes to prep instead of 2 hours. 
And then when they're done, they literally just pull the covers off, they just have a bucket that they throw them in. A lot of different colors, it don't matter, they're all getting painted anyway, some were like, violet, purple, others were like, oh, I ran out of green, and others were like, keep going.
It didn't matter. And I printed off, like I said, 60 sets of these. It was a good sale. I sold them for 10 a set. It was a 600 sale. That was, it took me like four days to make them because that's a lot of pieces. That's 120 pieces that I had to make. But all in all, I was like, I made some money.
They're happy. They're more [00:59:00] efficient. But now the cool part is that I've established myself there. They're like, Hey, could you make this? Now it's turned into that the relationship. So they're like, Hey we got a guy that does 3d printing. Not only does he do printing, he does design work. I'm telling you right now, if you do designing in the 3d printing space, you'll make it a lot farther in the next five years.
Yeah. For all those that are just doing printing, I hope y'all Bamboo sped up the timeline on that sucker so much that people really don't realize that was an Ender 3 Pro. I was like, okay, I figured in about 10 to 15 years, one every 10 households would have a 3D print. Now that Bamboo came out, it's probably like in the next 5 years, everyone, 1 in 10, and it's going to be, it's plug and play.
so many people are going to start like, 3D printing their own designs. So the people that are really going to benefit from these are going to be the designers making stuff because everyone's going to be able to print their own things.
And I've noticed that a lot of flea markets the one that my stuff is at right now. I was there yesterday with the girl that had her stuff. [01:00:00] She's not 3D printed stuff, but she was at the same art place and is like a volunteer person that helps like sales wise. And she had her stuff there. I had a little bit of my stuff, but then I noticed very familiar to me was like a booth, I don't know, 50 feet away.

It was like a big eight by eight, a big 10 by 2010. Everything was articulated, or like the expandable swords. Yeah. It was really cool, but at the end of the day, not a whole lot moved. it's going to be harder. I think a lot of people who go to those shows, it does become difficult because you're pricing each other out almost in a lot of those scenarios. 
Unfortunately. How much can you undercut before your profits are. Just barely enough for what you want, and it's getting to that point.
And like I said, the only people that are benefiting right now are the designers. Yeah. I ran into that problem as a designer, having all these people. Like on my Patreon that we're commercially making the plant stand and I actually had one guy come back to me and he's on Etsy and he's I got 10 other people selling the exact same thing.
Yeah, how [01:01:00] do I not exactly get ahead, but how do I stand out? Yeah, how you differentiate. So with the plant stand here, what I told him to do is some people have been buying those, but they're only available in red. And I actually had someone message me that's Hey, I bought a plant stand from somebody.
I haven't assembled it yet. But is there a way you can make a purple head for that? Yeah, no, like You know what, I have someone that's been asking for something different, so I sent him the message, I was like, Hey, here's an idea, print them in different colors, and just the head, because even the original, everything is all swappable, the bases all go together, the heads all go together I made it that way on purpose, so it's like almost customizable.
Yeah. This one looks really weird because it doesn't have a head on it. But I told him, I was like, if they haven't assembled it, that piranha head fits right on the top of this. He started doing that, and he's dude, he's I've sold five or six of just the heads, or I make them in different colors, but nobody else does.
Because they're not paying attention to what everybody else is doing. He says, But he [01:02:00] was also one of the first guys that jumped on the boat when I asked for help printing. He's was communicative to me about that and it was really cool because he's I can do this or print the stems in a different color, print the pots in a different color.
Yeah, that's a cool thing. You can do a 3d printing. You can mix it up a little bit. And so like someone did like a Halloween one where it was like a black stem 

and like an orange, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, if you're out there and you're making something that everyone else is 
Don't use brass nozzles. But things like that, it's it's real fun to make and create, because Having the community come back and say, Hey, can you make this? Or, Hey, I'm having difficulty doing this. Unfortunately that's where me and I've done, like I said, like I talked to you earlier, I did an interview with someone, no names, that was where we disagreed on was they're like I designed the stuff, anyone who prints it, they're on their own.
And that's where I was like, Nope, I'm drawing the line. I ain't like that. I want people to be successful. I want people to be able to print this and be able to sell it. People are like, I ship it out, but stuff breaks. I'm like, [01:03:00] how are you shipping it out? They're like, Oh, assemble! No! No.
You, I have videos out there for assembly, even like the link to the cable that goes in it, because it doesn't make sense for me to stock the cables and then just resend them out. You might as well get it from Amazon in two days. But like all that so I send it together with glue and to this day, I haven't had anyone complain about that.
Yeah, provided the videos I provided, all the tools are there for you to make it and make it work. So that's part of the whole process is yes, you're a designer. But if you're a designer and a printer, you understand that. If you print it once, you're like, okay, that was a pain, but you only printed it once.
Some people are printed two or three times that, they're like, I like your design, but there was parts of it that were difficult, that were hard. And because of that, someone else made a version that took away from, fixed all those aspects before you did. Sorry, I'm moving on. No offense, I don't blame you.
I do. If it's easy, you're gonna do it. [01:04:00] Especially if you get the same results. Sorry, I'm talking a whole lot. I'm babbling a whole lot. I like to talk about my stuff. No, it's okay. I can tell you're very passionate about it, which is cool. I love doing it. It's fun talking about it. With the Kickstarter, I'll just admit off the bat, I suck at taking pictures of products. I just, I'm just terrible at it. I just am. I try really hard and it's probably something a lot of my patrons complain.
They're like, these pictures suck. I'm like, sorry, I don't have much to work with around here. But anyways, I reached out to the high school and to their media 

department and ended up doing a thing. I was like, hey, at the media department, I could have someone make me a video. And for a high school student, this will go in their portfolio. 
So plus one to them. And I get the video on my side, plus one for me, both relationships work out. So I was thinking of stuff like that. So they made me the promotional video for the Kickstarter. That was really cool. And then in turn, they got a doc, like that was the agreement. And. Because I did that, the guy that's in the media department walks me down to the CAD department there at the high school, and I end up [01:05:00] getting to talk to the teacher.
They have 11 Ender 3 Pro printers. It was like, okay, cool. So somewhere like Direct Drive, so it's like they mess around with TPU.
there we go. But they messed around with more materials that I did. I actually just started getting into PETG for a co worker of mine that needed something made. I sold him. 20 pool caps for to go on the joints of his pool. He brought them to me. One was cobbled out of cardboard and wood.
And he says, I want it to look better. So it went down to the CAD department. it was really cool collaboration because I was able to talk with the CAD guy down there. And he ended up getting the 203 pros at the volcano hot ends, which is really cool because they're actually having problems.
Printing things in a higher temperature because they're still trying to do it with the stock hotends. So that's why I was able to offer my expertise, and he's we're having problems printing this, and then he thinks for a second, he's wait a minute, the two that you gave us, would them do it?
I'm thinking, yeah, actually they would. That's what I designed them to do, and he's okay, and I haven't heard from them since. No news is good news, [01:06:00] hopefully that he's hey, we got these two printers that can do something different, and they'll print faster. I even told them, I'm like, you can max those out, they'll print as fast as you want them to print, and he was going, Really?
We're all used to 15 millimeter per second prints? 200? This is awesome. And yeah, now I got a bamboos that do 300. But, it's the relation, building the relationships has actually been the funnest part of the whole thing. Honestly, I love doing the prints. It's a relationship.

So because I build them with the retro gaming convention down there I got to meet like a customer of mine. That was really cool. I was super excited like Yeah, it's like I buy your stuff and I like your stuff and things like that So it's really cool meeting like with the people that you like sell to because they're You make stuff that not everybody else makes when I was on Etsy actually had one competitor But they weren't really competitor because they made wall mounted stuff Oh, and I made the stands and I just kept it that way. 
Cause I was like, they can keep the wall mount and stuff. I'm not interested in the stuff that I'm, I know how to make, I'm doing good with how to make them. [01:07:00] So that was okay. Like we competed at the same time we didn't. And now I got a bunch of Patreons out there that take care of all that for me.
 I'm not at the point where this is like now my full time gig, I'm pushing so hard to be at the same time. I burned myself out because I was like. I'm working, I'm, trying to take care of a house right now at the same time that, you know, and I'm printing, I'm designing, two kids, wife, you name it, everything.
And it gets exhausting after a while, and then I feel bad because some of my patrons are probably like, I had one time I didn't release anything for two months, because, I was so burnt out and everything the cool part was that like I made a post about it. I was like, 
Sorry. I haven't released anything. I was like, I've been burnt out. It's been like depressing for the last two weeks. And the cool part is they, a lot of them reached out to me. So now they check up on me every once in a while, which is more than I could ever ask for. That is the coolest part is developing the relationships with people and all the kickback that gets with it.
So yeah, that's, I've talked for a long time. I am so sorry. I feel like I'm [01:08:00] sorry. It's it's been very interesting hearing about all your different projects and all the various different places that you go into. And like I said it's very clear how passionate you are. Just how much thought goes into your models. And I think that really speaks volumes to, not just them looking cool, which, There's endless files that you could go online and find that look cool. But when it comes down to the function and when it comes down to like just those little details, I feel like it's rare to find a file that has all of those packaged up into one.
 I was gonna end you with one final question here, but for you Up until this point, you've had so many amazing files. You've had so many amazing different 

routes that you've went with 3d printing. But if you fast forward, let's call it five years into the future, where do you see things going in terms of your models and in terms of 3d printing? 
At this current point with doing the retro, this is something I think I mentioned, right at the first start of the video is that the reason I expanded and go in different directions, because you could only do so much stuff for retro. New retro systems are not exactly coming out. I kept like Nintendo 64, [01:09:00] GameCube and Genesis were my, the 3 biggest ones, Genesis being a really hard 3rd that people like collect for a lot. Mostly, it's the Nintendo 64 because of so many different colors. It's insane how many different colors in that system came out. Even to this day, I still find new ones.
But looking into that like at this current point, the Switch 2, or whatever it's gonna be named, is supposed to be coming out sometime next summer? I think? I don't remember. But, I'm I Getting ahead on that, I really hope it keeps the same USB C functionality. It would be really cool if they kept the same form factor, because from what the rumors that I'm hearing is they're looking to keep the same form factor, but they're just changing up the hardware.
If they do that, we know this from looking at game systems before they don't like keeping the same form factor because then they can't tell you stuff. Looking ahead to that, I can understand why some of people buying for newer systems right now are starting to drop because everyone's waiting for the next thing to come [01:10:00] out.
Yeah and it's really hard designing for those because, no offense, gaming systems cost money. I paid 400 for the new Xbox Series X, I've made one design for, and I haven't really sold that much of it, and it's city because I don't use it. I have the Switch OLED, the Switch Lite, I have all three of those for obvious reasons.
I make a lot of Switch stuff. I just find it to be the most versatile console to design for it's Not that it's easy, but I've done it so many times. I have the measurements up in my head where I can literally tell you the exact measurements of certain aspects of the system to make them work.
Yeah, it's an older console, but it's still one that I find myself reaching for. Yeah, I still love it. Yeah it's cool because everyone still buys them. They're still new, but it's, I joke around with people, I'm like, oh, you have a Wii U too. And it's angry because they're like, what was the Wii U?

I was like, it was a great system. that was what kickstarted the whole thing for me was the oddball system. But I joke about it all the time with people, but honestly I like it because of the portability of it. 
developing stuff for it is still ongoing. I'm [01:11:00] actually trying, I'm in the process of designing a Bob Omb Nintendo Switch dock. Just something completely different, but has the same cable functionality to where it will work for, you can set at one spot and it'll still connect your TV.
It will still charge. It will still do controllers. That is a very critical thing for me It doesn't take that much more to do that. I don't think a lot of designers understand that You just need a USB extension cord like it does so much.
It's simple, things like that, but I'm running out of time here. it's hard at this point to design for more stuff And there's still so much more stuff that I want to do, but then at the same time doing so much going on. Getting exhausted and burnouts happening much more often lately and Trying to understand that personally and be able to take the time for myself and being like this doesn't need to be done right now Chill relax.
My wife has really been kicking me around for that. She's I don't know how you do it I was like, I looked at her like I don't know how I do it Because it's bad. I am. [01:12:00] I'm not a morning person. I will stay up till 11 o'clock at night and still get up for work at 5 a. m. Don't ask. It works. I don't know how it does, but yeah, it's my brain don't turn off till that late.
And it can be, lately I was designing that Bob omb doc and honestly, I was about halfway through it and I lost interest because I was like, my brain's my brain's we're done. We're done right now. And so I'll have to come back to it at a later time, but it's. Being a Patreon, I feel, is more demanding than I thought it would have because people expect files all the time.
I would expect files all the time. I think the only reason I have as many as I do, which is not a lot, I have 30 or so, so it's a little low. That they stay on is because I'm the only one that Prints and designs and stuff that I print design. 
I definitely wouldn't have the fan base that I do, but I like having. Yeah, was able to communicate with a couple of the guys that do patrons and they're like, hey, I got a couple of game stores that buy a bunch of stuff from me and, they're looking for this, or they really like this aspect.

And actually really cool quick thing. There's 1 last product. [01:13:00] I almost completely forgot about that. I want to do more with. I stole the concept the same thing with the dump stamp. I'm going in a different direction with it. Oh, so it doesn't look like much. But if you're familiar with STL Flicks, which a lot of people are, you'll know maybe their bright art lineup, where they would cast a light beam to, your wall. 
So this, hanging up, will actually cast a GameCube logo. Oh, now that you say it, I can see it. Yeah. Yeah, like in the inside, it's got all the lights. I'm gonna tell you what though, they are very good gatekeepers of how they pull stuff off. If anyone that's been doing that and trying to replicate their stuff, they do not give away details.
It took me quite a while to figure out what lights I had to use to do this, but it runs off of 12 volt. The only issue is some of their prints, they do run off of your little garage door with their batteries. It'll light up for five minutes. Yeah. So yeah, like this one just plugs into a 12 volt port that I was using for other things.
But yeah, it's really cool. I have it on my TikTok and on my Instagram [01:14:00] where I was like, Rearranging the lights in this thing? Holy crap, this was probably the biggest pain, because they had to be perfect to get just the right logo, otherwise some lights were off and the beams, and this thing probably got backburned at least three or four times before I finally like, okay, let's get this done.
And now, honestly, it sits back here, it should be in white. But it sits back here and I haven't even sold this to like any of my vendors because I'm like, there's still a few things I want to work out with it. But this has been one of the really cool things to work with is working with lights in different ways.
So I almost forgot about that guy. He sits back there, but it's a cool one. there's still a couple of things around here that I'm not going to bring up right now because they're currently in the prototyping process. Not that I'm giving away any spoilers, but they're meant for summer outdoor fun.
That was like a new thing that I'm going into right now. Yeah the pool of little swords is technically part of that. That's true yeah, now that you say it. Yeah, it was technically part of [01:15:00] that. The other thing I'm working on right now is prototyping something that was from my childhood.
Not a lot of people had, it was just an uncommon thing. It wasn't that it was 

expensive, just uncommon. This is one I bought. It'll fly through the air about 300 feet. Oh, I've seen you making videos about this. 
But I'm working on replicating this to do a 3D print. It's taking a lot more than I thought to figure that It doesn't even look like there's much here! I was gonna say, isn't it funny how the simplest things can be the most complex to design? I'd like to figure out how they actually came up with this if it was a complete accident, because honestly, the amount trying to replicate this I got, like I'm working on a bunch of different pieces and everything, I've actually had to reach out to a fab shop to make me metal bands, because that's apparently the counterweight that these use, but currently it's going really well, but I'm going through phases, there's certain things that I want to be able to do with it, and it's important to me to document each phase, so technically I've actually replicated this.
But I want to go further my actual endgame is be able to take and [01:16:00] model whistlers that were used on the Nerf Vortex footballs and put it on there. So there's one of those That'll be cool. Thankfully, those only take an hour to print.
It drives me nuts, because there's 50 cents of material from the one I bought. They sell them for 20. That's crazy. And I can 3D print, make these for 5 or 10, still under sell, but now I can print them in so many different colors and variations.
That's the whole thing with 3D printing is people don't get is the customization is nuts. Like I said I so appreciate you talking us through so many of your projects and showing off your amazing collection of things for people who don't follow you yet and want to just follow along with your journey and follow along with your files.
Where can they find you online and where can they get? My tech talk is currently on the hold on. I don't have the tech talk on this 1, though is currently what I've been doing the most of my traffic just because I've noticed I get more feedback and stuff from it. I do have an Instagram and a Facebook the Instagram.
I'm trying my best to [01:17:00] repopulate it more. Like I said, it's just really hard to keep up with a lot of socials these days. People don't realize how hard it is to keep up with all the different colors that there are and keep them all equal. And I'm currently revamping my website because that's another thing I 

said, I suck with pictures. 
Sites take a lot of pictures. Yeah, be patient with me on that. If you are even one bit interested in this guy, which is really cool, it's finally up on there for sale, that in the mini version. It's probably one of the more coolest things that I've made because it's got so much functionality that I did not expect it to have.
But yeah TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, I post to Instagram, but post to Facebook, so that one I don't have to worry about. When it comes to my designs, I do have a Patreon. It's a 5 personal. 10 commercial, which is about normal for everybody else. 
My Patreon is actually managed differently than everybody else's, and this is thanks to a member, a patron of mine that actually recommended it. I hate the way that Patreon organizes files into posts. I hate it because I have to scroll through so much stuff to find things. [01:18:00] So my Patreon, every single post is public, which is great.
So you get to see everything that I do. Oh, nice. Cool. But the files are managed through a Dropbox. So it's something that's completely familiar and it just loads up on your computer like you're going through your own files. That's nice. I love it. Yeah, the only issue is that I do the email addresses all manually.
So if you sign up for the patreon you're like Hey, how do I get the Dropbox link? Please? Just give me a little bit of time I promise I will get to it by the day. I'm at work. I can do it And then I've had problem with people that I have an old Dropbox account and it doesn't use the same email then definitely get with me because obviously I'm just going to copy and paste one email to the other.
And then my Colts 3d account has got a lot of stuff on it, which still needs stuff posted to it. I just, I'm just terrible with it.
I don't have a lot of places to take pictures that just look good. Like I just don't that's one of those things that I just don't have access right now because I am such a limited [01:19:00] space. If you are a vendor, however, and you want some of my stuff in your store, contact me, we can set something up.
It doesn't matter where you are to ship all over the place. But yeah, that's always cool. I always love getting in contact with people that are as much interested in my stuff as I am, or even more. It's always exciting. We can always 

talk about so much stuff. But, yeah I appreciate you so much for taking the time to come on here. 
And with that said, that is our episode of meet the makers.