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3D Printing And How It Accelerated The Create A Castle Prototype Process
What if I told you that I’m a tech geek at heart, me the inventor of a new sand toy. That my life revolves around an electronic lifestyle and it’s my life blood to create all things digital on the internet. I love all things gadgets to the point of a flaw. I love anything that is electronic, digital cameras that have amazing megapixel counts, drones with 4k filming abilities, you name it, I love it if it’s anything revolving around tech. What If I told you that I survive through the internet and all things digital and electronic. Would you believe me? Would you believe that a guy who made his living off of all things digital thought of something so non-digital as a new way to construct sandcastles?
While I love tech and all things digital to this day, there is something about “unhooking” or “unplugging” from all of that, there is nothing more natural or organic then going back to our earliest of years of playing in the sand. It’s therapeutic in a sense, it removes us from reality and all things digital that we have all become obsessed with as a culture and nation, as a planet. I’m still guilty of all things tech, it is after all how I’ve gotten to the point where I am, it’s how I make my living, but I found it a necessary part of my life to remove myself from this on a recurring basis, sand art and constructing sand castles (and now snow castles) was my method of choice to do so.
Enter 3D Printing technology. I had some friends being in the tech space who migrated to this new sector that was blossoming out of nowhere. Suddenly you could construct homes overnight, print medical devices on the fly to save lives, and print things that only our limited human minds would limit us from dreaming up. After seeing this tech space flourish and having witnessed close friends migrate to this space, I realized that this was the technology of choice to utilize for rapid prototyping Create A Castle. It was the perfect combination of plastic meeting the sand to shape it in ways never dreamed up before and with a whole new view, a whole new perspective.
Enter Cad produced .stl files from my engineer and rapid prototyping from the stl provided to a close friend who had become part of the 3D Printing world. It was like the 3D Printing Gods were reaching out to me saying, use this technology that you are indirectly connected to and build your system to confirm your idea! After all of the years of pushing code an making things show up on internet browsers properly, I realized I had a short window of opportunity. This was it, my one chance to utilize a flourishing technology that I partly understood and partly didn’t, but nonetheless I had the connections to make my vision a reality overnight by supplying the necessary files.
3D Printing literally changed the way I thought once I had a hold of the necessary files to share with my good friend for years. It could transform a once thought that I had into something physical, something tangible. When I first saw that glorious print in view it was a unique feeling, something really that I can’t describe other than just simply put, amazing! Here was something being printed using a plastic filament that looked like a coiled strand of spaghetti that I had only dreamed up months ago, it’s something I can now hold and utilize for early testing. I can’t stress enough how important 3D Printing was in the process of developing Create A Castle. It literally saved thousand of dollars and also many many hours of taking the guess work out of whether or not my idea would work. Yes there were more crude concepts that I had utilized to prove my split mold theory would work, but this was a much more accurate representation of what I had dreamed up.
So here we are, now working with a manufacturing plant and nearly ready to take a dream from just under 1 year ago to a physical and tangible product that can be utilized by the masses. 3D Printing holds a big place in our invention process and I’m guessing that it will hold a big place in many inventions to come. We are happy to have been able to utilize this technology that has literally changed the world we live in what feels like overnight to produce our product in the early testing phase. We encourage all inventors to utilize this technology to produce the next great thing, after all it’s our imaginations that limit us, not the technology.
