Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E15 Too Tall Toby | CAD Best Practices, Speed Modeling, & Gamification
Join Aaron Moncur as he interviews Toby Schnaars, a CAD expert who has revolutionized learning 3D modeling through gamification. With nearly three decades of experience in tech support and training, Toby shares insights on CAD best practices, speed modeling, and his innovative platform that makes learning CAD fun and engaging.
Main Topics:
- CAD Best Practices
- Gamification of CAD Learning
- CAD vs. CAD Tournaments
- Community Building in Engineering Education
- Speed Modeling Techniques
About the guest: Toby Schnaars, known as Too Tall Toby, is a leading figure in the 3D CAD world. Starting his journey in 1996 with CADKEY 7, he built his expertise through thousands of SOLIDWORKS support cases and over 200 training classes while working at top resellers. In 2018, he joined Dassault Systèmes, where he led global training initiatives and helped launch major programs like the 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS Partners Webinar Series and SOLIDWORKS Live Design.
In 2022, Toby founded TooTallToby, a platform that brings gamification to CAD education through tournaments and challenges. His innovative, community-driven approach makes learning CAD engaging and accessible for engineers of all levels. Toby’s mission is to make engineering education exciting, inclusive, and fun.
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Before you even launch the CAD system, just take a minute and look at the model and ask yourself, where should the origin be located in this model?
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we are so thrilled to have a true legend in the world of 3d CAD, Toby Schnaars, better known as too tall. Toby, with a career spanning nearly three decades, Toby has helped 1000s of engineers master CAD spanning multiple platforms and now leads a global movement to gamify CAD learning from his roots in tech support and training to his YouTube presence and CAD tournaments, Toby is not just a CAD expert. He's a community builder, educator and innovator, reshaping how engineers learn and connect. Toby, thank you so much for joining us on The being an engineer podcast today.
Too Tall Toby:Wow. Aaron, thank you so much for having me and thank you for such a nice intro. You're very flattering, and I'm not sure I deserve all that praise, but I sure do appreciate it. Well, I gotta
Aaron Moncur:butter you up before I get into these hardball questions. We're gonna have some some tough questions today. Toby,
Too Tall Toby:that's an excellent strategy. And you've been doing this for a while. I've seen you. You've interviewed a lot of heavy hitters.
Aaron Moncur:It's been a minute. Yeah, we're on Season Six right now. A few weeks ago, just interviewed the CEO of former CEO of Mark forged, founder and CEO. We've had the CEO SolidWorks on, we've had the founder of SolidWorks, John Hersh dick and the founder of onshape on, we've had some really pretty cool guests. We've had. You know, this one's actually kind of surprised me that not as many people knew about this, this next one as I thought would, and maybe I'm just so familiar with him, because I have a couple of boys who love watching his videos. Do you know the hacks? Beth? Oh yeah, yeah. James Hobson, so he was on and it's interesting, I found that not that many people in the engineering world really know who he is. Really more of a, yeah, more of a YouTube sensation than, like, in the core engineering side of things. So again, I guess I just knew about him, because my boys always watch his videos. But he's pretty cool. I
Too Tall Toby:feel like he's kind of like, directed Jason to the MythBusters type fan. You know, there's fans of Mythbusters. They would really enjoy the hack Smith, definitely.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, he's got some amazing content out there. Cool. What's his name?
Too Tall Toby:Greg mark. Is that his name from marked Forge? Yeah, right. Fantastic interview. Yeah, it's not Craig.
Aaron Moncur:It's his first name is escaping me now I can't believe it. Sorry. I
Too Tall Toby:blocked you by saying Greg. Yeah, sorry, Mr. Mark.
Aaron Moncur:It'll come back to me at some point, but that was a great interview, probably one of my favorite. He's super interesting, really smart guy, and has lots of great stories to tell as well. He had some great advice for engineers and entrepreneurs on the show,
Too Tall Toby:and clearly just a lifelong engineer, like, even early on, like, that's what hooked me in right away, early on in that interview, when he was talking about the design process of the march forge machines, I was like, Oh, I could listen to this guy all day.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. Well, let's hear a little bit about your story. How did you become too tall Toby? And, okay, hold on first. Where does the name too tall Toby come from? I'm guessing, and has something to do with your height. So that's a sub question. How tall are you?
Too Tall Toby:Too tall? Toby, wow. This is a lot of questions coming at me once all
Aaron Moncur:of you, we're gonna be the hardballs one. Yeah, buddy, you up first, and then dive right in. I like
Too Tall Toby:it. Well, thank you. Yeah. So, so the name too tall Toby comes from me being pretty tall. You know, I go to conferences and things, and people are like, Wow, you are pretty tall. But it also, believe it or not, has a reference back to Icarus and, like, definitely a reminder, you know, to be careful about flying too high too quickly. Like, it's definitely one of the biggest and most important lessons I've learned throughout my life, and I am often a victim of biting off more than I can chew. I think that's kind of like an engineering curse to a degree. You're like, I could do that. I could do that too. I could do that too, you know. So that's, that's a big part of it, too. The older videos on the YouTube channel, you'll see, there's a little animation of me standing up out of a chair and then actually hitting my head on the sun, and then I go out and like, that was always the intro for, you know, for the first couple of years of the YouTube channel. And that's, that's that's where that intro comes from. That's where the name comes from. It's just kind of a, you know, it has, it has its roots in Icarus, but on the surface, it's just because I am pretty tall, pretty tall, yeah, but pretty tall. Toby doesn't sound as good. Exactly, exactly, yeah, and yeah. And then as far as my roots go, I mean, the. The where I am currently is I'm trying to bring the idea of 3d CAD and gamification together. So I'm trying to create a platform and an environment and a community where people can learn 3d CAD and can have some fun along the way. And where this really came from was a long career of doing tech support and training, and the tech support part of my career was really about answering calls that come in from customers. Customers would call up SolidWorks customers primarily, and they would say, I can't figure out how to get toolbox to work, you know, or my install is broken. Can you help me go through and reinstall and clear the registry and get a fresh download? And they would also ask questions like, what's the best way to build this product? What's the best way to design this part, but they would also occasionally ask questions like, what's the best CAD system out there? And that was the beginning of kind of planting a seed in my mind. Of you know, how would we even determine that? Because to me, it was always more about the user, like, if the user is a wizard, that it didn't matter if they were using Pro engineer or creo, or if they were using SolidWorks, or if they were using CATIA, or if they were using Autodesk, or one of the Autodesk products in that time was actually mechanical desktop, and then it became inventor and now fusion 360 but I always believe that it didn't really matter what the CAD system was. It mattered more who the user was. And so that kind of planted a seed in my head of like, well, what could we do to get these users together and actually get them to kind of compete against one another? And so did that. Did tech support for a long time, did training for a long time. Got a lot of experience doing tech support, doing training. I think I fielded over 10,000 tech support cases, and I've taught over 200 professional CAD training classes and and then a couple years ago, 2022 we decided to break out on our own and to form this new platform to help people learn CAD and not just one single CAD system, not just solid works, not just on shape, but any CAD system. It's truly a CAD agnostic platform, which I think really makes it novel. And, and then we set out to kind of come up with different ways of gamifying that process, and that's, that's kind of where we are now.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. What? What have you learned from running CAD versus CAD tournaments that you didn't expect going into it? Well,
Too Tall Toby:the CAD versus CAD tournaments are, are one of those forms of gamification. You know, we what we do is we set up a qualification process where we say we're going to take the top 16 people from around the world, and we're going to pit them against each other one verse one. And what we're going to do is we're going to show them the same 2d drawing at the same time, and then we're going to challenge them to turn that 2d drawing into a 3d model, and whoever can can calculate the mass of that model correctly, first will be declared the winner. They will move on in the tournament. So we start out with 16 people. We go one v1 that person moves on to the round of eight. You know. We go one v1 that person moves on to the round of eight. One v1 one v1 now we're down to our round of eight, and the winners of those matches go on to the Final Four. Then the winners of those matches go into the the ultimate finals, and then we find out who's the world champion of 3d CAD speed modeling. And the cool thing about that, that format, and probably the thing that I've learned, the thing that has surprised me the most about hosting these tournaments over the past couple of years is that there's not as much of a delta between speed modeling and proper 3d CAD modeling as people think at first, okay, it's something that is often a concern, you know, and I'd say a legitimate concern. You know, you don't want to teach people bad habits. You don't want to teach people how to, just like, slap a model together with no dimensions that can't be edited. You know, we've all worked with models like that before. It's no fun. You know, you're trying to get it out the door by a deadline, but then if the customer comes back with a design change. As soon as you make one little change, the whole tree blows up. And that is no fun. And so we often will hear criticisms from the audience, where they'll say, you know, or really detractors who might say, you know, speed modeling is no good because it teaches people bad habits. But if you watch these tournaments, if you watch these CAD versus CAD tournaments, you'll find pretty quickly that the users are following best practices. They're just doing it really, really quick, you know. So for example, one best practice that users will follow is they will fully define their sketches, but they will often create multiple contours in the same sketch, and then they'll use that same that one single sketch to extrude multiple features. They'll do an extrusion to one depth, then they'll do a second extrusion to a different depth, then they'll do a cut extrude, all from that same sketch. But the thing is that sketch is fully defined, and there's a lot of value to having those multiple features working together. You know, being able to reference one area of the sketch to another area of the sketch is often very valuable. So I don't think of that as a necessarily a bad practice or a negative practice. I just think of it as a very efficient way to use that tool that they're working with. So I think that's probably the biggest thing that has surprised me about watching the cavers CAD tournaments is just there's not really that much of a delta between. Like what you might consider speed modeling techniques versus best practices. I think the the runners, especially when you start watching into like, the round of eight and the semi finals, and especially in the finals, they're still all following best practices. It's not it's not taking shortcuts that's making them a master of their trade. It's the fact that they've got a few years of experience, sometimes many years of experience, and that they've learned best practices, and they and really just through practice and repetition, they've learned how the software is going to react when they do certain steps, like when you do an extrusion in SolidWorks and you finish the extrusion, that that extrusion remains highlighted Well, that means that means that maybe you could immediately jump into a shell command and that extrusion will be highlighted, or you could immediately jump into like a body copy command, and that extrusion will be highlighted. That can be very valuable when you're trying to jump from one feature to the next to the next, not only in speed modeling, but in your actual job. And you can take those skills that you learn and apply them in your actual job. You're
Aaron Moncur:probably in the top 1% of CAD skill in the world. At this point, you have so much experience, and you've taught it for so long, it's just part of your DNA. At this point, I would imagine, what are some of these best practices that you refer to like when you're teaching your courses, when you're helping people work through best practices for CAD modeling. What are the like? 2345, things that you hit on all the time make sure you do these things
Too Tall Toby:or don't do the Yeah. So fantastic question, and a really important question, especially when people are first getting into the world of que CAD. And so one of the first things that I encourage my students to do is before you even start sketching, before you even necessarily make the the you know, the part, before you even launch the CAD system. Just take a minute and look at the model and ask yourself, where should the origin be located in this model? So in 3d CAD, the origin is your 000, your x, y, z, 000, and whether you're looking at a 2d drawing or looking at a physical part, or even a hand sketch that somebody gave you, sometimes people will come out from the shop and they'll say, hey, we need a bracket for this fixture, for this prototyping fixture. Can you model this up in 3d CAD? And those give you a hand sketch. Well, the first thing you should be doing is looking at that and saying, Where am I going to put the origin in my model? Where am I going to start? What's going to be the 000, for this model? Now to answer that question, you need to think about things like, Well, where are most of the dimensions coming from? So in the case of that bracket example, maybe if that bracket is going into the corner of your part, then all the dimensions are going to be coming from, kind of like an anchored corner. You can usually tell pretty quickly when you're working with a manufacturing team where the key dimensions are anchored off to, you know, where they're planning to zero from when they're machining the parts, or how that part is going to fit in into the corner fit, how that part's going to fit into other parts in that design. So you want to ask yourself, Where are most of the key dimensions coming from? And wherever those dimensions all intersect, that's a good location for the origin. Then the next thing you'd want to ask yourself is, does the part have symmetry, or is it at least close to having symmetry? You know, maybe most of the part is symmetric, but there's one extra slot on the right side. Well, that's okay. That's going to tell you that the the third plane of that XYZ is going to be going right down the middle of your model. So deciding on where the origin is going to be super important and definitely something you want to think about before you even start your first sketch. And then I'd say the next thing you want to think about is, now, what should that first sketch look like? You know, is that first sketch going to be a view of that part looking down on it from the top? Is it going to be a view of that part looking in from the side. Is it just going to be one portion of the design? Am I just going to do the base right now and then I'll start designing the arms as a secondary feature? You know? What is that first sketch going to look like? And that's something that, you know, you really get that by practicing. You really need to just practice, practice, practice, practice your trade. You know, it's just like if you're an electrician and you need to put in a new circuit, you need to put in some new light switches, you know, you're going to go through kind of a similar mental checklist. You're going to ask yourself, like, what gage wire do we need? Is there already a breaker in the box to work from? Do we have enough wire? Do we need to go through a junction box? You know? Like, you're going to ask yourself all these questions, and you're going to kind of plan out what's going to happen. Well, the same thing needs to happen in 3d CAD, you need to look at the challenge that's in front of you, and then you need to kind of start thinking through a mentally mapping out how you're going to complete that challenge.
Aaron Moncur:Total tangent here. Throwback to what we were talking about earlier. Greg, Mark, maybe you said, Greg, I heard Craig. That could have been my fault. But anyway, Greg,
Too Tall Toby:I think I said, Greg, yeah, okay, good memory.
Aaron Moncur:It was gonna come back eventually. I knew it was gonna come back eventually. Okay, so these best practices, how, like, I think inherently, I have a drive to just do things the way they're supposed to be done. Because it feels right to me, somehow that's that's probably part of being an engineer, like inherently, we just, we want to do it the quote, unquote, right way, whatever that is. If we extrapolate that beyond just the DNA of an engineer, do these best practices translate into higher job performance, faster growth as an engineer, maybe advancement in your company, more money, higher salary, that type of thing. Or is it primarily just the pride and knowledge that I'm doing things the right way?
Too Tall Toby:Well, I think that you know, you make a fantastic observation that that is what engineers are pre wired to do. We want to determine what is the most efficient way to solve a challenge. What is the most efficient way to get a job done? You know, it's not even necessarily the fastest way, although it often does go hand in hand, but it's more so, just like not wasting steps, not wasting material, not, you know, not wasting anything, the most efficient way to design a system or to solve a challenge. So I think that that definitely is kind of built into our DNA. But I think that what I hope that people will get out of doing the challenges on our website, and out of, you know, participating in the CAD versus CAD tournaments and and even just spec being a spectator for the challenges during the tournament. What I hope that people will get out of that is the ability to use the CAD as a tool to allow them to focus more on the engineering. You know, what we're teaching on the website is not going to teach you how to select the best material. What we're teaching on the website is not going to teach you what the best bolt configuration is to hold those different components together, or how to properly design channeling so that you're not going to inadvertently ground through the system electrically. You know, that's not what we're teaching. Those are engineering challenges, and they're important, and I feel like as an engineer who's striving to design the most efficient systems possible. Those are the challenges that are the most interesting. They're the most exciting. You know you. You have an engineering background. You, you know you. I know that you and I talked offline, and you shared with me that that was actually the thing that got that gets you the most excited about designing machinery and designing custom machines, is solving those engineering problems. So what I hope that people will get out of working with the tools that we offer, the challenges that we offer, is the ability to really embrace the engineering and to to not get too caught up in the muck of the CAD itself, like we really it's almost like a musician analogy. It's like when you start playing enough guitar, you kind of stop thinking about how to hold the chords down, and even necessarily like what chords to play, and you get to really enjoy playing with other people, you know. And what I hope that people will get out of doing our challenges is kind of that same thing where it's like they're not even really thinking about the CAD the cat is just kind of flowing through them because they've got all the repetitions down. They know all the scales, you know, they know all the moves, and they're able to just create these models really quickly, really efficiently, and then focus on the engineering challenges. Because, you know, that's, I think, even more fun than just doing the CAD. It's, it's, it's fun to solve those challenges and to come up with a solution. And it starts to become a little bit less fun if you feel like you're constantly fighting with the CAD system, or even if it's just slowing you down, even if it's just slowing down the process.
Aaron Moncur:Well, speaking of fun, I think it's really brilliant that you have gamified the exercise of learning CAD, because CAD is daunting, especially if you're brand new. It's a big program, a lot to learn, and it takes a long time. So make gamifying it is a great twist right to make it more enjoyable for engineers, especially young engineers, to pick up cat. How have you seen gamifying? CAD training, CAD education help engineers learn it better and retain what they learn,
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Too Tall Toby:Well, a big chunk of our audience right now is those younger engineers who are attracted to what we're doing because of the fact that it is it does resonate with them a little bit more. You know, we we have a discord channel, which is typical. Basically going to be a younger audience who's on Discord. We do a lot on YouTube. We do a lot on Reddit. So a lot of these are these younger audiences, and what I've heard from them time and time again is that it's great to be able to go to the to talk Toby website and to see the different challenges that we have posted there. So we go to choosealtobi.com you sign up for a free account, and now you've got access to our practice models challenges, and those challenges are organized by tier level. And what that tier level represents is a level of complexity. It's basically how many features would be required to create this model for for a normal person, for somebody who's not, like, intentionally trying to decrease the number of features. So the first tier level usually it takes like, one to three features to complete that. So it would be like, you create a sketch, you'd extrude the sketch, and you'd fill it the corners. That would be an example of a tier one challenge. So by going through this tier one challenge and doing all the challenges that are available at tier one, it gives the newer engineers almost like a sense of a completionist, you know, mentality where it's like, I want to try and get through all of these before I advance to tier two. And now we get into tier two. And so now maybe we're, we're doing a revolved part that has a hole that's going through the middle, that has a rectangular base on the bottom, and maybe that ends up getting into the right the range of, like, five or six features, you know. So these are bite sized challenges that even a novice could complete in, say, under 15 minutes, you know? And as you get faster and faster, you're able to complete these, these challenges even faster. And then then we're able to go on to the third level, the third tier, and usually around the third tier, that's where people start really trying to hone their their CAD skills and hone their CAD workflows. So you know, I mentioned to you earlier that as you continue to go through these challenges, you start to learn different shortcuts, different ways, just to use your CAD system. Like in the case of onshape, there's a fantastic shortcut in onshape where you if you create a fill it, and then you hold shift and you press enter, that takes you back into the fill it command to create a new fill it with a different radius. So learning that that workflow is there can save you a lot of time when you've got a model that has three or four filets on it, but then you're also able to learn some best practices, like it's better to save your filets until the end of the model, rather than doing them midstream. So now you've got, let's say, three filets at the end of this challenge. And you get down to the bottom, you do the first one, you shift, enter, jump into the next one, and then you realize, oh, you know, another shortcut. And on shape, you can right click on an edge and say, select parallel. And so if you've got four edges on the corners of your of your base plate, or on the corners of your pocket, let's say that's going to get all those corners at the same time, and it's going to be a nice shortcut that you can use, not only to complete the challenge, but also to use in your regular CAD career. Well, where we've gamified this, and usually it's around tier three that people start using. This is we've added a try again clock so you can do the model, and maybe it takes you 15 minutes to do the model, and then you can go back in and try again. And now you know the second time through. Of course, you know you already know what the model is. You already know what your modeling strategy is. So maybe that knocks five minutes off the challenge, but you're able to start implementing and experimenting with some of these workflows and really truly see over time how much faster you can get with the same challenge. And you get to answer questions like, Would it be better to add these filets at the sketch level, or would it be better to make the corner sharp and then add them at the feature level. Now, of course, there's going to be a CAD Best Practices part of that equation as well, but you can really start to experiment with, you know, which one's faster, which one's more efficient, which one is going to hurt me later? You know, if I need to go back in and make a change, you can kind of experiment with that too. And you can do this in kind of a more of like a safe environment, where, you know, you're not going to be messing up any of your company's models. And probably the other huge advantage is that you're going to be presented with challenges that you might not do at your regular job. You know, a lot of times in our regular job, we get pigeonholed into just doing sheet metal all day, and we never do sweeps and lofts. And so it's nice when you go to an environment like this, where it's like, oh, this is cool. This model has a weird swept bar going through it. I wonder how to create that in my CAD software. And so now you're going to expand your knowledge of your own tools even further. If
Aaron Moncur:I was a young engineer right now trying to really hone my skills in CAD, I would just be eating this up. This would be like, what I would do when I get home from my day job, I would practice on the gamified site. Walk us through so for those who are listening to this, thinking to themselves, yeah, I want to check this out. I want to try it. I want to increase my CAD skills. Go to too tall toby.com and then walk us through the process like, what? What do we expect to see as we're working through these challenges? Do we get prompts after we finish that say, like, Oh, good job. But here's like, here's a pro tip for how you could have done it even faster. What's that process like?
Too Tall Toby:So the process is that you like you said, you go to teachall toby.com, you. Sign up for a free account. We have, we think we have, like 15 or 20 challenges that are free for everybody. The library is a total of 150 challenges. So there is a Pay option where you can upgrade and get to the full library. But there's plenty to get everybody started for free. And what you do is you go into the very first challenge. So challenge number one is very simple, tier one part, and you try to model that up. And as you're trying to model up the part, you're presented with a 2d print, a clock and a validation field. And in that validation field it says, what is the mass of this model. So when you look today, you have to learn how to read a 2d print. You have to learn how to look in the title block to see what the material is and what the material density is, and maybe in your CAD system, that material has a different material density. So you have to go through and you have to figure out how to create a custom material, or input a custom material density. Well, this is going to be a pretty valuable skill for engineers, to learn how to make their own custom materials and learn how to add them to their library. So there's like, a little bit of a learning through osmosis in that regard. And then you're going to try to model up that part, and you're going to enter your answer down in the validation field. Maybe you answer, like, 120 grams. And you press enter, and then it says, nope. This is wrong. Keep trying. The clock is still running. And so, you know, pressure, you look, you look at the pressure, yeah. So you look at the print, and then you realize, like, Oh, I missed this dimension here. So you go back, you know, go back through, fix all your dimensions, try again. You enter the correct answer, and it says, Congratulations, you've earned one point on the completionist scoreboard. And if you want to, you can, you know, you can go back through and you can try again and get a faster time. Now what we've also added is, down below the challenge, there's a table called Community tutorials. And what that table does is it lets you see tutorials that other users have created, and I've created quite a few of those tutorials as well. So if you get stuck on any of these challenges, you can watch a tutorial. Now I primarily specialize in onshape and also in SolidWorks, so most of the tutorials that I've made are in those platforms, but there's users in free CAD. There's users in Fusion 360 iron CAD. We have one iron CAD user who, I think, has done the first 100 challenges and created an iron CAD tutorial for them. So there are, there are tutorials in quite a few different CAD systems that the users can watch. So if they do get stuck, or even if they just want to watch somebody go through and you know, to your point, if it's like, did I really do this the most efficient way? A lot of times, watching somebody else model something you just tried is the best way to learn because you realize, like, Wait, what did he do there? And then you you roll back the video, and you're like, Oh, that's great. Oh, I'm gonna, I gotta try that on my next run.
Aaron Moncur:That's a fantastic format. So you get the pressure of being timed and having to do it yourself and probably failing a couple of times, depending on the complexity, but then once you're finished, you can take a breath and take a look at how other people did it. Learn from them. Chances are a lot of these tutorials are going to share some pretty great pro tips that you don't even know about. I love it. That's great, fantastic. How has your community grown over time? And what are some of the things that you guys have done to promote that growth? So
Too Tall Toby:the community is fantastic. Like I said, we have a discord that is very active. We have a lot of people in there helping out when people get stuck on the practice models. But we've augmented the community with a weekly live stream called model Monday live. So so far in this interview, we've talked about the tournaments. So with the tournaments, we have a qualification period. We get the best eight people or the best 16 people in the world, and we pit them against each other. But we use a similar format each week on a live stream called model Monday live. And what we do in model Monday live is we we live stream on Mondays at 1pm east coast, and we show a 2d print to the chat, to everyone in the chat. So I just say, all right, is everybody ready for this next challenge? Here we go, 321, go, and I flash a 2d print up on the screen, and everybody's watching from their computer using their CAD system, and they're watching on YouTube. And what they do is they take a screen capture of that 2d print and they maybe move it over onto their second monitor, and then I start yapping away about, like, here's some news from the world of two tall Toby. You know, we just released a new training class, or we just added a new feature to the practice models app, or there's an upcoming tournament. I share all this news with them. Well, while I'm sharing the news, they're frantically modeling this 2d drawing, trying to turn it into a 3d model. And some users are using inventor, and some users are using free CAD. Some users are using solid work. Some users are using build 123, D like the the users are using all these different CAD systems from all around the world. And then what they what they do is they start entering the mass into the chat during model Monday live. And so all of a sudden you see an answer come in, and it'll be like 250 grams, and then another answer will come in, 269 grams, and then another answer, 214 grams. And you see all these different answers. And then gradually they kind of converge, like 233 grams, 233 grams, 230 83 grams, like, all of a sudden everyone starts coming in with the same answer, because they've gone through and they've looked at their model and realized, like, Oh, I did something wrong. And so they correct. And so it's really fostered the sense of community, because we get the same members of the chat every week, and they hang out in the chat, and then they hang out in discord together, and they, you know, they really communicate with one another well, and they help each other out. And so it's, it's the perfect companion piece to what we're doing on the website and to what we're doing with the tournaments. We have this model Monday live, where, every week, you know, some of the regulars in model Monday live are former champions, former world champions of the tournament. And so we get, you know, we get regulars in there. We've got Aaron C who won the the model Monday live leaderboard last year. So every time you answer correctly, you know all these different answers are coming in. Well, at the end of the the live stream, I go through and I look at the answers, and I say, Okay, it looks like Aaron C was the first person to answer correctly. So he gets one point on the model Monday live leaderboard. And Aaron C won the whole thing last year. So now you know, he's continuing to dominate this year in 2025 and it's just it's such a fun environment because everybody's in there, kind of trying to dethrone Aaron C, trying to, like, knock him off at his pedestal. And we have, like, Victor K, who won the world championship in 2023 using SolidWorks. We have ramros workshop, who hangs out in there. He won the world championship last year using Fusion 360 so they're in there battling it out. And then we got Aaron C trying to defend himself. And then we have lots of other, you know, regulars in there as well. We have GERD, we have Mr. Alex, we have all these great regulars in there, Pico boo, and it's just like, it's just such a fun community. It's just such a like, you just kind of feel like you're at home. As an engineer, as a cat enthusiast, you just really feel like you're at home. And the nice thing about that format is that it doesn't matter if you're the fastest person or the slowest person in there, like you have plenty of time to answer, you know, and we don't reveal the correct answer to the end. And so really, anybody who's able to get that answer, get the correct answer in that compressed period of time under that pressure, is a winner. You know? It's a it's a total win.
Aaron Moncur:How fun. How fun. Building a community like that is a beautiful thing, and congratulations, and my hat is off to you for for being able to do that. I think you've, you've probably brought joy to a lot of people's lives, right? Just having this community of like minded individuals and everyone can support each other and have fun together. That's a big accomplishment.
Too Tall Toby:Thank you. Yeah, it's a, it's, it's always been my, you know, my passion has always been kind of bringing these people together, letting them learn, you know, being able to, kind of, like, it's like an edutainment type of a mission, you know. And, you know, I've always, always tried to kind of mix in that, you know, education and entertainment together. I think it's one of the best ways to learn. I think people learn the best through humor, you know, and through excitement, as opposed to, like, just having to grind through a lesson. So, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:well, let's, let's go back to your support days, just real quickly. You spent a lot of time helping engineers understand what problems they might have and how to how to solve those problems in their CAD models, what were some of the most common support calls that you would get, and the solutions to those support calls? Have you ever wasted weeks fixing a design issue that could have been caught early or struggled to find real, practical answers to manufacturing or tolerant stack up problems. PDX 2025. Is not your typical trade show. It's a hands on engineering training event built for problem solving. Learn advanced CAD surface modeling, Gd and T, DFM, adhesives and bonding techniques, metrology and much, much more directly from subject matter experts in the industry. Bring your toughest engineering challenges, get live expert advice and see real world solutions in action, PDX 2025 is happening october 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona, walk away with new skills that make you more valuable help you grow your career faster and even increase your earning potential. Spots are limited. Sign up now at the wave,
Too Tall Toby:yeah, the the tech support was a lot of fun. I, you know, I gotta tell you, that was my favorite gig ever, you know. And it was, it was a really, it was a really cool experience, because while I was working that job, it was a relatively small company, and we, we all knew we were in a good place. You know, it was one of those things where it was like, it's not like, I look back on it now, and I realized, like, oh, we had it so good. Then, if I can only go back to those days, like we knew it while it was happening. We knew that it was lightning in a bottle. We knew that eventually it was gonna end. You know. But we just embraced it, and it was just such a good team that it was so fun to work at a room with other tech support people. And you just, you get to hear your your coworker on a call with a customer, and you're able just to, kind of, like, get up and go over and lean over his shoulder, lead over his or her shoulder, and and listen in, you know, listen into the call. And you get to learn, you know, that way, being able to learn that way, and being able to help one of one another out. And you hear your co worker make a suggestion to a customer, and you in your head, you're like, that's not going to work. That's not how you do it. And then you see it work, and you're like, what you could do it that way? This whole time, I had no idea you could do that, you know? And then the thing was so cool about about that job is that whenever you learned a new piece of information like that. Inevitably, it would be a call later that day for you, like, you would get that same totally obscure thing, and then it would come and, you know, you just learned it that morning. And then that afternoon you would get a tech support call, and you like, Oh yeah, you know, there's a registry key you can edit that'll fix that. You know, everybody knows about that. You literally just learned it three hours
Aaron Moncur:earlier, the universe at work.
Too Tall Toby:Yeah, the universe of work. But yeah, I'd say, you know, the calls were, were very, very range. I mean, we had a we had an award that we did that was anybody who did over 1000 calls in one year, anybody who closed over 1000 cases in one year, got an award. We had a plaque. I actually still have the physical plaque here in my office, even though, you know that that company was, was absorbed into a bigger company quite a few years ago, I still have that plaque here. And that's a pretty big accomplishment. You know, over 1000 calls in one year we had, we had one tech support engineer who did, I think, 1600 in one year. So that's a lot of calls, like, when you break that down to per day, day after day after day. So you know, doing that many calls, doing that volume of calls, that's a you're going to get a pretty big range of of issues. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that that just speaks to the power of gamification. I mean, here you are, all these years later, and you still have this plaque, and it still means so much to you, because the owners of that company were forward thinking enough to gamify the support calls, right? Whoever makes over 1000 you get this special award, and, boom, everyone's trying to hit over 1000 That's great. Yeah,
Too Tall Toby:it's, it was so so it's so genius. It's so cool. And, you know, such a great company to work for. And, you know, and like you said, it was, it was the beginning, like, a lot of the seeds of what I'm doing now got planted there. You know, when, when people would call into tech support and they would say, what is the the best CAD system out there? That was, that was planting that seed. Like, in my head, I was like, it doesn't really matter. The one doesn't matter as much as the wizard, you know, so let's have a wizards battle. Like, what do we need to do to have a wizards battle? And I was thinking about it even way back then. I was thinking about, like, how is this going to evolve? How is this going to become a thing? And then a few years ago, I think it was in 2020, I think we did our first tournament, you know, we actually get to see the wizards battle. Now, that one was, was a lot of SolidWorks users who were in that one. It's very SolidWorks heavy. But over the past couple of years, we've gotten so much more variety of the different CAD systems. I think last year for the world championship, we had 16 users. I think we had 14 countries represented, and I think we had six different CAD systems represented. And so we truly got to see a wizards battle. And over the past, you know, few years, we've been hosting it, we've had an inventor world champion, we've had a SolidWorks world champion, we've had a fusion 360 World Champion, and we've had an on shape world champion. So it really speaks to this, this theory of like, it's not so much the wand, it's more about the wizard.
Aaron Moncur:It makes me think this is not a direct analogy, but it's close. I did photography for some time. A friend of mine and I, we owned a photography company on the side for several years, and I still do photography, even here at my company, I do a lot of the photography of finished products and that we put on our website. Anyway, I remember thinking about, what's the most important thing for photography? And obviously it's, it's the monkey behind the camera, right? It's the technician behind the camera who's controlling everything. But outside of that, what, like, what are the most important elements to achieving a really beautiful photo? And what I came up with was, I know this is totally a tangent. It's not engineering related, but a thought in my mind. So I'm going to go with it. I The most important thing is the lighting. It's the lighting in the environment, right, whether that's ambient lighting or you bring your own studio lighting, but I think that's the most important element to making a really wonderful photos, getting the lighting right. And then the second most important thing, I think, is the glass that you're using the lens, because the lens can have a pretty dramatic effect on like the depth of field, your your blurred background, things like that. And then third is Photoshop skills, editing skills. There's all why that goes on in Photoshop after the the photo is taken, and that can make or break a photo easily, right there. Anyway, I. Say all this, getting back to engineering if, clearly, it is the wizard that is the most important, not the wand, right, not the tool, the CAD system, that's being used. So with that understanding as our baseline, our foundational context, here, are there different CAD systems that are better utilized for certain functions, like, I don't know if I'm if I'm doing machine design, is there a better CAD system for that? If I'm doing consumer product design with with a bunch of organic surfaces, is there a better CAD system for that? Do you have any opinions there?
Too Tall Toby:Yeah. I mean, I say yes, the answer is yes. That's the short answer. I don't know if I'm qualified to, like, go down a list of of what CAD system will be best for the specific applications, but yeah. I mean, there's definitely, like, in general terms. You know, fusion 360 for a long time, has had the the, certainly, at least the reputation. I think it has a lot more to do with their the with their their pricing scheme, more so than maybe it's probably both actually like when it comes to having integrated cam and doing CNC right inside of the cat package. I think fusion 360 has that game locked up. You know, I think that when it comes to multi user collaboration, you're not going to get much better than onshape like, multi user, simultaneous collaboration, team, collaboration, like, on shape.
Unknown:I don't know. Is there
Too Tall Toby:anyone else that does that? If there is there, you know, I haven't seen it, certainly not done as well as they've done it because, just because the way that they reimagine the entire infrastructure of the the file management, like, it's not files, you know, you're essentially doing everything on the fly, on really, it's essentially a database in the background, but like the real time multi like you and I could be working in on shape from two different locations at the same time on the same part, and you could be adding features in one area of the part, and I could be adding features in another area of the part. And it's like, no problem. So I mean on shape, you know, you and I talked a little beforehand. I'm definitely super impressed with that solution, and particularly in that, in that domain. But, you know, they just added cam like they're they're clearly accelerating much faster than any other cat system because of how new they are. So it's like, every time you turn around, they've added another amazing new feature. So I,
Aaron Moncur:am so impressed with onshape. We we have a volunteer program called CAD club, and we have middle school and high school age students come in to our office Wednesday afternoons, and we teach them how to use CAD and some engineering. And we use onshape for that. And it's been awesome because it's free for students and for personal use, with some file sharing limitations, I guess. But anyway, for these students, especially, they can bring their their public issued laptops, these crummy laptops, right? That barely open the internet, but they run on shape just fine, because it's in the cloud. There's nothing to install. They have tremendous they've put a tremendous amount of effort into building out tutorials just to learn how to use their software, really, really well done and fun tutorials, right? It's not just like the standard super linear engineering jargon, like they've got like memes of, you know, people doing silly things in their tutorials. And I think it's just, it's wonderful. I'm going to use this as a shameless opportunity to plug our PDX event that's coming up October 21 and 22nd it's an in person training event. It's not a trade show trade show. It's a training Expo. And onshape is actually one of our premium sponsors for this event. So they'll be there. They'll be talking about advanced surfacing in onshape. They'll be talking about some some automation that you can use in on shape. It's, it's, you have access to the code in onshape, and so you can actually go in there and tweak some things. And so they'll be talking about some automations you can do just I'm so impressed with the company in general, by the way, if you want to learn more about PDX, go to the wave dot engineer, and there's all sorts of information there. So
Too Tall Toby:what, what is, what is the the PDX? So when, when does it take place? October,
Aaron Moncur:21 and 22nd here in Phoenix, just outside of Phoenix, a town called Mesa, we've rented out a convention center, and the idea is to pair service providers and engineers, right? So, like this thing has to pay for itself. So there's a commercial aspect to it. It's a paid event, so for for attendees, it's relatively inexpensive. It's a few $100 for an attendee to be there, and exhibitors pay a bit more to be there. But we are. We've made it a requirement for exhibitors to provide training at the event. So this is not like
Unknown:training for the attendees or the attendees.
Aaron Moncur:They. Exactly, yes, yeah, yeah, right. So it's not like you show up and you know, you're just getting flyers or whatever from these suppliers. They're holding these training sessions, and so things like GD and T and Advanced Service modeling and plating and finishing and DFM for CNC machining and injection molding and tolerance analysis, like all of these things that are relevant to engineers developing physical products and devices, there's going to be just, you know, dozens of training topics that they can attend there. And it's in October, so the weather's nice here in October, it's going to be very cool. We're super excited about it. Thank you for asking. I'll in my a good way to spend two days. Not bad, not bad. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you.
Too Tall Toby:Good tips and tricks, yeah. And what? What is the, what is the? You call it the CAD club. CAD
Aaron Moncur:club, that's right, yeah. So we, there's a whole story behind this, you know, I'll just tell it. I'll tell the story right now. It's near and dear to my heart. This was probably three four years ago. My son was in high school. Must been three years ago in high school. And my wife also works at this high school, and she works in the front office, and so she kind of hears all the things that are going on at the school, right, good and bad. And they got a call this one day from a parent, and the parent says, hey, my son left the house a few minutes ago. I don't know exactly how long, but I know he's gone now, and he has a gun with him, and he's heading to your school, and you need to, like, lock things down, right? So not the kind of call that any school wants to get, and so they locked everything down. They called the police. Within minutes, there were heavily armed police officers surrounding the perimeter of the school. There was a helicopter, police helicopter flying up overhead. Right everyone's on the lookout for this kid, and they found him luckily. And sure enough, he had a gun with him. He had stashed it because he saw all the cops and they found the gun. So Crisis averted, thankfully, right? And you know, I'm thinking about my wife there and my son there, like, what could their day have been like had the police not found this kid in time and things had gone poorly? And I'm thinking to myself, Man, I can do something about this. Or what can I do about this? I don't have a ton of resources, but what, what is something that I could do to to mitigate a situation like this, to just my small part, to help things not like this happen again, right? And so I thought, you know, CAD is pretty cool, and I bet there are kids out there who would like to learn CAD, and maybe we could do this thing called CAD Club, where we open our doors and students come in and they learn CAD, and they learn a little bit about engineering. But really, here's the secret, right? The secret is that we're not really teaching CAD. We're not really teaching engineering. What we're teaching is what healthy adult behavior looks like. And if we can do that for, you know, a handful of kids a year, that's a huge success. So that's what we've been doing all the time. The kids think they're learning CAD and engineering, haha. We tricked him, and it's been wonderful. It's been a really rewarding experience. How
Too Tall Toby:frequently is the does the club take place? So we do two
Aaron Moncur:terms per year, and each term lasts for 10 weeks. So on Wednesday afternoons, they come in for two hours, they're here. We're doing on shape. We have we talk talk about some soft skills as well our CAD club tenants, we call them, and there are some special activities. We usually have a guest speaker comes come in sometimes, depending on what's available, we'll do a field trip to a local engineering or manufacturing company. And kids will get to see, you know, things being manufactured and super rewarding. It's been awesome. Wow, that's
Too Tall Toby:so great. Yeah. I mean, it gives them not only, not only a trade, you know, the start to getting a trade, but maybe also, you know, for a lot of time, a lot of times, especially nowadays, kids really struggle with kind of figuring out a purpose, you know. And so if you're able to kind of give them the tools, who knows, maybe one of them turns around and realizes like, Oh, if we designed this differently, you know, if we designed this differently, it would be more safe. It would be, you know. And now, now they're doing something it seems kind of benign, like, maybe it's a like a bus stop or something, but, but like, they take on that, that job, and they realize, like, Oh, if I just make it this way, it'll be a little more safe, and now, all of a sudden, they have more of a sense of purpose. And like that feeling is so important, especially for the younger generation, especially right now. So that is that's amazing. I mean, you said, like, if we could help five or six kids each year, it's like, if you could help one kid each year, you know, or one kid across your life, it would be worth it. So if you're doing five or six every session. That's, like, a huge win,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, one kid, especially if you're the the parent or brother or sister of that one kid, right? And, yeah,
Too Tall Toby:yeah. And just get him back on track here to show him, like, you know, it's so cool. It's such a great story. And that's, that's, that's really inspirational. And the fact that you realize too, like, like, you don't have to be a multi millionaire to make a difference in people's lives, you know, if you just, sometimes, just sometimes, just open up your doors and show them a little attention. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:you do what you can, you know, a little bit. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, kind words on you. Well, let's see. I think, man, we've got so much more that we could talk about, but we probably have enough easily for you. You got
Too Tall Toby:to interview, you got to interview her. Stack. John her stack. Well, I did that
Aaron Moncur:was awesome, yeah, my favorite story from him was how he funded the very beginning of SolidWorks. Do you know this story? I've heard some rumors. Yeah, yeah. You know this story. He gambled in Vegas and counted cards, and that's how he he got enough money to start the very, very beginning, right? Little bit of seed funding for for his solid works. Well,
Too Tall Toby:he told me a story once you might find kind of interesting. Oh, let's hear it. So he told me that when you are working in SolidWorks, you you're pretty you're a SolidWorks expert, right? You're pretty deep in SolidWorks.
Aaron Moncur:I spent, uh, over a decade deep in SolidWorks, yeah.
Too Tall Toby:So what, what did describe for me for our audio listeners, what does the rebuild icon look like in SolidWorks?
Aaron Moncur:Oh, man, was it like a red light, green light stack exactly
Too Tall Toby:like a little traffic light, right? Yeah. So he told me that when they were first developing SolidWorks, they didn't know what the icon for rebuild should be, and so one of the developers was like, why don't we just make it this traffic light kind of looks like kind of looks like an England traffic light. We'll just, we'll drop that on there for now, and then we'll figure it out later what the rebuilt light will be. Well, here we are 30 years not only are we here 30 years later in SolidWorks, but that icon has been adopted by other CAD cell. How funny. And it's almost like everybody like, it's like, I've heard people make up stories like, I've heard instructors make up stories like, it's called rebuild, because, you know, when you come to a traffic light, you kind of stop and then restart. So it's like, you're rebuilding. Nothing to do with the true Genesis, no meaning at all behind that, the placeholder, and now it's actually been adopted by other cats. Funny, I love it. I love it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's great.
Aaron Moncur:That's great. Yeah. Well, Toby, I think we'll, we'll start wrapping things up here. What? Maybe final question before we do so, what? What's next for too tall, Toby, where were you? What do you hope to be, you know, three, five years from now? Where do you hope your platform will be your community all of that. Yeah.
Too Tall Toby:So, I mean, what's next is that we're trying to continue to roll out enhancements for the users. We're trying to continue to make sure that that that gamification itch gets scratched. You know, we just this week, actually roll out a new enhancement, which is the speed modeling leaderboard. So up until now, all we've really talked about is how our users can go in and they can kind of challenge themselves, and they can, you know, they can do the model, and then they can do it again, see if they can get faster do it again. But there's a subset of these users who really want to take it to the next level. So it's very similar to speed running in video games, where people try to figure out what's the best way to get through this level. Very similar idea. But instead, it's speed modeling. So you take a single model, you start the clock, you hit record on your your you know, whatever you're using OBS or whatever your screen capture software is, you hit the start button on the clock, and you try to model the thing as fast as you can. Maybe the you know, we're collecting times from everyone, from everyone who's doing these models. So maybe the average time for the model is 15 minutes, and maybe you're able to do it in 90 seconds. So you record yourself doing it, and then you can post that recording right onto our website, and you can, you can actually compete against other users and see who can get the fastest time. So you land on this new speed modeling leaderboard. So you get to show off your skills, show off how fast you are. And the thing that's so cool about that, you know, similar to the tutorials, is that we do, we do a similar mechanism for the tournament qualification. So we've seen some of these speed modelers before, and they come up with such clever exploits, like when you create a fill it in SolidWorks, the next time you go to create a fill it, it remembers that value, remembers what the value was in the feature. So maybe what you'll do is you'll make like one fill it as a sketch, and then you'll make the second fill it using feature, because that that value is already embedded in the feature as like the default value. Exploit it that way. Or we had one user who was using the intersect command and Solidworks in an incredibly clever way, like I'd never seen anybody use intersect like this, like he was doing, essentially bullying addition and subtraction, using intersect instead of just like a really, really clever, novel way of using intersect. And so then what was cool is that after we saw him do that a couple of times, we started seeing. Other SolidWorks users adopting that same strategy tried their times to move up the leaderboard, up the speed modeling leaderboard. So speed modeling is now, you know, it used to be exclusive to our monthly challenges and to our tournament qualification. Now is available for every model in the library. So any anybody could do speed modeling, anytime you can challenge your friends, you guys could say, like, let's, let's try and do speed modeling on this, you know, on this particular challenge. Do you guys
Aaron Moncur:ever do events for companies like, I mean, companies are always looking for, you know, team building type opportunities, right? Do you guys do things like that? Yeah. I mean, when you ask
Too Tall Toby:the question about where we're going in the future, that's absolutely where we're going. Yeah, we're trying to, we're trying to get ourselves in involved with more companies. So if you're listening, you're out there and you have a company and you want to do a team building event, like, please call us up. We'd love to work with you. You know, host a tournament just for you, a custom tournament just for you. We just last month, did our very first tournament for our high school. So we're hoping to get more involved in that type of thing to, you know, just work with high school students and help them understand that. Because the thing that's cool is that when you when you label it as like an engineering challenge, it's like you're going to get a couple of high school students who are into that. But when you label it as like an E sport, like or a CAD speed modeling or a minute e sport, and especially the way that we've we've been able to work in kind of CO commentary to help make it a little bit more accessible, even to people who aren't into 3d CAD, you know, now it starts to get the interest of people who maybe wouldn't even have considered engineering. And then they they realize, like, Oh, this is actually pretty cool. And then when you work in 3d printing on top of that, and you show them like, Hey, you could actually come up with a really cool idea. And then 3d print it, and you get that satisfaction, you know, within the weekend, instead of having to mail it out and wait, you know, wait six months to get the thing back. You know, that's, that's a really appealing proposition to students who maybe wouldn't otherwise consider engineering. And so that's awesome.
Aaron Moncur:I'm, I'm thinking back over the years to all the different engineers that I've worked with, and they all had varying levels of CAD capabilities. And, you know, I think I can pretty definitively say that the ones who were able to work faster. I mean, it sounds so obvious when you say it, but I'll, I'll just be explicit about it, the ones who are able to work faster. I paid them more. You know, they made more money. So if that's what your profession is, if you're a CAD designer, mechanical design engineer, I think the platform that you've built is such a great tool for these professionals out there to enhance their their craft, right? To get better at CAD design, faster at it, increase the value to themselves and to their companies. And, man, it's almost like a no brainer, you know, if you're looking for an opportunity to improve, go check out your site. Too tall, too tall, toby.com and improve your CAD skills. Yeah, thanks.
Too Tall Toby:And it's, you know, I think it's, it's almost like the natural evolution of a trade, right? You go from being an apprentice to being a journeyman to being a master. And when the, you know, when the master electrician comes over to your house and and he sees the way you wired in, you know, your your light switches, and then he's gonna add another circuit, and you see him do it all with one tool, you know, like, he just uses, like, a flathead screwdriver, and he just, like, cuts the wire exactly to the right spot and strips it, and then, like, he's got the sniffers, and He sniffs it. And you just see him work after you, like, sat there painstakingly for hours, you know, just like you, you're trying to perfectly dead everything into the breaker box, and he's able just to go through it, like he's not sacrificing quality. He's not taking shortcuts and sacrificing quality. And I think that's the difference between, you know, it's really, it really represents the true journey to mastery. You know, it's a true mastery. Like, it's not that you're learning how to do something super fast and you're sacrificing quality. It's that over time, you've learned how to do something as efficiently as possible. And so when you watch the CAD versus CAD tournament, and you watch the final matches, you know, we show these users a tier five or a tier six level complexity drawing, and they're looking at it, and in their head, they're, you know, in a matter of seconds, they're going through and they're mind mapping the entire process. They're like, I'm going to use an extrusion here. I'm going to use revolve. This will be a thin feature. I'll do my fill it's first, so that I pick them up in the thin feature, they're thinking all those things so quickly as soon as they see the challenge, and then they're going through and they're modeling it up. And that's kind of getting back to the point that you made, is that, you know, you get to that point by having a lot of experience and putting in a lot of practice, and so, you know, it's warranted that you're going to earn the higher salary once you get to that point once you know what all the tools are, and when, when the customer comes to you and says, Can you model this up for me? And gives you, you know, a technical drawings package, and you're not going to get stumped by any of the geometry, you know, that's, that's a valuable skill, very and that that's what we hope to, you know, to continue to help people learn. Yeah, and we and we hope that along the way, you get to have some fun doing it, and you get to have a little bit more fun doing your job too, because you're not, you're not as frustrated feeling like, I feel like I'm going the long way around every time I make this set of features, like we're going to help you get there a lot faster.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome. And engineers want to learn how to do it the right way. I remember, there was a guy who worked here a while back, and he was always asking that question in in Ken, what's, what's the right way to do this, what's the best way to do this? And you watch YouTube videos, you know? So anyway, I think we're all just kind of wired that way to begin with. Yeah,
Too Tall Toby:it's actually kind of the fun part about things too, you know, a little, I'll give you a little inside baseball here. The this, you know, part of, like, the secret sauce of what we're doing is that, and the natural state of an engineer is that they will look at a system, and especially if it's a system that they haven't built or designed themselves, and they'll say, why did he Why did they do it that way? I would have done it so much better. I would have done it so much more efficiently. Like, it doesn't matter what it is. You show an engineer a bookshelf, they'll be like, Why did they build it that way? And why did they arrange the books that way? You know, like, like, it doesn't matter what you show them. And so it's a it's a perfect fit for our challenges. Because anytime we show our challenges, especially when we show the average time, CAD designers and engineers are always like, I could do that so much faster. And so now we've given them a place to go. Like, come on in. Let's see you do it faster. Like, prove it. Do it against the clock. Record yourself doing it, you know, upload it so everybody can see it. So we're really trying to give give them the ability to do this, and also give them the ability to kind of pass it on, because all of us learned from experienced engineers, you know, as we were coming up and they were willing to share their knowledge. And so we're trying to give them a platform where they can now share their knowledge forward and share it with the new engineers that are coming up through awesome
Aaron Moncur:well, Toby, thank you so much for all of your contributions to the engineering community, for what you're doing for engineers. I think it's fantastic. How can people get in touch with you? How can people engage with your community?
Too Tall Toby:Yeah, two talk toby.com is the website. If you go to tell toby.com you'll find all the links for the discord and for the for all the different applications that we have for the tournament registration. It's all there to tell toby.com and then you can also look me up on YouTube. You know, look up to tell Toby on YouTube, you'll find all of our content. You can start tuning into the model Monday live, the live streams that we host every Monday. We have a lot of fun with those live streams. And our next tournament is currently open for registration and qualification. So free entry into that tournament. Anybody with a free to talk Toby account can enter that tournament totally for free. And we're going to start live streaming that tournament on May 2. So we're going to be live streaming it every Friday in May, even if you don't want to, want to compete, it's a lot of fun to watch these different CAD engineers from around the world using two different CAD systems. That's probably, you know, that's probably the other thing that's really fun is watching a lot of times you'll see two different users, two different CAD systems, and they might think, look at the model and think, where should I put the origin? And they might both make a totally different decision. You know, what's going to be my first feature. They might make a totally different decision, but a lot of times when it comes to that final feature, they converge and they end up right at the same point, almost right at the same time. We've had plenty of matches that have ended within seconds of one another, and so it's so cool. Two users, two CAD systems, two different countries, and they finish within, you know, just a few seconds of each other. It's so fun to watch. So may 2 is going to be the first, first live stream of that tournament.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome. That is some good, wholesome, nerdy fun right there. Toby, thank you so much for being on the show today. Great to talk with you, and we just appreciate everything you're doing for engineers out there. Yeah. And thank
Too Tall Toby:you. Thank you, Aaron, for putting together this platform. It's so much fun to listen to all the episodes, listen to all the podcasts. So please keep it up. I've learned so much from listening to you interview all these fantastic guests. So it's a real honor to be on here with you. Thanks Toby. All right.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online visit the wave dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
