We primarily make unique designs to represent small organizations that would have difficulty accessing custom work. For example, military units face multiple barriers, from a lack of explicit funding to membership churn over the years.

During his own time serving in the Army Reserve, our founder saw an unmet need in the quality and consistency of items provided to service members. Units rarely have a dedicated awards person, and whoever is asked to take this on works with limited resources (including the time to find and review options).

We will work with your organization to make something unique that can represent your members for years to come. And then, we will work to make sure that it can be made sustainably, within your budget, and using local resources, so that your awards program (or fundraising effort) can be enduring.

Design for Manufacture is an engineering principle that relates to changing certain parts of a design to accommodate the way in which a product will be made. A look at our projects page will show you many crests and logos that are mostly 3D printed from plastic in-house. Printing in multiple colors at once is an inefficient process, but like many aspects of 3D printing, it can be orientation-dependent.

The pictures below show a very exaggerated example of printing a two-color block (10mm x 20mm x 50mm, printed using a Bambu Lab CX1 with AMS) that is oriented either with the colors side-by-side or stacked on top of one another. In this case, printing with the colors stacked saves nearly 80% of the printing time and material waste.

Despite these savings, there can be many reasons why you would want to make a design less efficient. Print orientation (what direction an object is built up in, layer by layer) can have serious effects on strength (important for functional parts) and surface finish (very important in decorative items like a unit crest).

This barely scratches the surface of what Design for Manufacture is all about. It also covers material selection, fastener selection, design for assembly/disassembly, and more.

We don’t want the items we make for you to be singular items. We want to be able to efficiently produce them at scale so that they can be made affordably for your team.

We can help you replace (or customize) small components that can’t be ordered, like knobs and switches. We can also redesign or customize housings to improve visibility, durability, or safety while using them.

We don’t have the staff or dedicated space for continuous production. We cannot do rush orders (with rare exceptions).

There will be many references to engineering principles on this website. Despite this, we do not provide engineering services or guarantees of performance. A principal tenet of engineering ethics is to only perform services within one’s area of competence (nspe.org).

We are a corporation providing specialty design services that are informed by engineering principles.